In Netflix’s new Spanish dramedy Fading Grandeur, we get to see two liars lie to each other to see whose lies win out. Sounds like it could be a fun show, right?
FADING GRANDEUR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A mansion in the middle of Madrid. Inside, a man in a robe calls the royal office on his cell phone.
The Gist: Don Leandro (Antonio de la Torre), the Marquis of Monsalvos, calls into the royal office wondering if the king has granted him the title of grandee. Despite appearances, Leandro is flat broke. He lives on the pension of his butler, Fidel (Enric Benavent); Fidel rents the house out for things like bath fixture conventions and a supposed “historical documentary” film shoot that’s sexier than he realized, just to pay for the upkeep.
When he finds out that his daughter Martina (Lía Lois) is pregnant, and the father is the son of another marquis, Leandro says he’ll pay for the wedding. But the only way he can do it is to sell the mansion. The large, crumbling building doesn’t attract all that many buyers, and the ones that are interested want to convert it into a restaurant. But when Sofia Carrington (Alexandra Jimenez), a wealthy businesswoman, expresses interest, Leandro turns on the charm and intensifies his sales pitch. It also helps that they seem to have good chemistry with each other. What he doesn’t know is that Sofia is actually named Conchi, who lives in a much more working-class part of Madrid and is trying to con him.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Fading Grandeur, created by Álvaro Fernández-Armero and Juan Cavestany, is sort of in the White Lotus genre, but with a much lighter touch.
Our Take: Fading Grandeur is supposed to be a somewhat farcical dramedy (that emphasizes the second syllable more than the first) about an aristocrat that goes to great lengths to hide the fact that he’s broke trying to sell his house to a woman who is a con artist. Each person in this transaction — and likely, a flirtation at the very least — is lying to the other, and the fun in this six-episode season is going to be seeing who gets found out first.
But, given that the first episode was more amusing than funny, we wonder if the show is going to spiral into absurdity as the story careens towards Martina’s wedding, or if we’re going to get to know both Leandro and Sofia a bit as the story goes along. Just why is Sofia/Conchi engaging in such a high-risk con and what is her ultimate goal? What got Leandro into this financial mess to begin with, and why does it seem like his own family — his father and brother — basically hate him? If we get into some of those details, the farcical aspects of the story will be easier to swallow than just seeing how these two liars try to figure out which one is lying first.
Performance Worth Watching: We enjoyed seeing how Alexandra Jimenez’s entire way she carries herself change as she goes from leaving a “date” with Leandro and arriving in her more working-class neighborhood, trying to return the knockoff bag she was carrying to the vendor in front of the train station.
Parting Shot: Conchi/Sofia grabs two oranges from a street vendor and puts them in her purse without paying, then walks down the middle of the street with a slight grin on her face, thinking she’s getting one over on Leandro.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While we have concerns that Fading Grandeur is going to lean on its farcical aspects too much, the idea of to liars trying to out-lie each other is an amusing one to follow for the show’s relatively brief runtime.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.