Spoilers for both Club de Cuervos and La Balada de Hugo Sanchez ahead
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For anyone who felt the bittersweet sorrow of the series finale of Club de Cuervos and longed to spend more time with the beloved characters and universe of Nuevo Toledo, this Spin-Off is just what the doctor ordered. It's funny, paced well, situated perfectly within the storyline of Cuervos (with one minor detail excepting this), full of new hilarious characters, and shows a window to the lives and motivations of some familiar supporting characters in Cuervos.
La Balada de Hugo Sanchez centers around the tournament in Nicaragua which was referenced towards the end of, I believe, Season 3. Isabel and Chava sent the team to tournament with Hugo Sanchez. They were counting on the monetary winnings of a tournament victory to help pay off their debt to the villainous Armando Cantú.
As with Cuervos, there are many laughs to be had watching La Balada. To me, the funniest part of the spin-off isn't so much any piece of dialog in La Balada itself, but the fact that in the original Cuervos series, the Nicaragua tournament accounted for maybe just a few innocuous lines on two occasions. First, Chava and Isabel realized that winning this tournament would help pay their debt to Cantú. Second, Isabel tells Chava to go with the team to Nicaragua, but Chava send Hugo in his place. Third, Hugo calls Chava to let him know they won the tournament.
That's it.
The fact that all the chaotic and at times unhinged events in La Balada transpired, - and for them to be wrapped up in just a few lines in Cuervos betraying nothing of the frenzy and madness that precipitated the tournament victory to neither the audience nor Chava and Isabel, is in and of itself hilarious,. This is the stuff of amazing spin-offs.
I do wish that in La Balada, Hugo was completely not in contact with Chava. The pissing incident had caught Chava's attention, which did not present itself at all in Cuervos, which seemed unlikely.
Another iceberg that only showed its tip in Cuervos was Fede's personal life. In Cuervos, his crush on Isabel in Season 4 gave us a glimpse of his propensity for flights of romance provoked by only the slightest sign of admiration from an attractive woman. We also learned from a few offhand comments that he had multiple families with multiple women in mulitple countries, and that two of them left him around the same time. In La Balada we see a similar descent into lovelorn madness as with what happened with Isabel, and the unraveling of his family life. Similar to the plot of the tournament itself, a significant piece of the humor was how much chaos was being hidden in plain sight in Cuervos, which was already had its host of chaotic events.
There are a few areas of critique. I wish that more of the actors were actually Nicaraguan. Cuervos seemed to stay true to the ethnicity and therefore accent of every character (you woudln't find a Mexican playing a Colombian or vice versa like in other Spanish language Netflix Originals like Narcos). This was not the case in la Balada. Delia, Elvis and the hotel employee that Hugo dates (I forget her name) are all Colombian. I'm not sure if Doña Maria Telléz character was Nicaraguan, but she seemed to lay on the silent "s" inthe Nicaraguan accent so thickly it would come off as a bit derisive if she wasn't. The actor who played Panda is the only one that I could verify to be Nicaraguan.
But since I am not Nicaraguan, I can't really speak to whether the show was offensive for Nicaraguans. My read was that much like Cuervos, it was at times heavily satirical of Mexicans of weathier status like the players who might be a bit out of touch. We saw a bit of these attitudes in Cuervos, when Chava said he did not want to go to Nicaragua because he did not want to get Zika and eat pupusas. Pupusas are Salvadorean, not Nicaraguan, and Zika was also an issue in Mexico and much of the Latin American tropics. In La Balada, Zombi doggedly clung to his veganism while in Nicaragua, starving himself for lack of vegan options. He even recruited the rest of the team to his cause. They were openly critical of the food they were served as guests due to their own voluntary dietary preferences- which is a spectacle of entitlement that I personally witnessed with European vegan and "gluten-free" tourists while traveling in Nicaragua. At one point they said they wanted to go to a "salad buffet".
It did seem a bit egregious that vigorón is served with a pig's head in the show, whereas that is not the case in Nicaragua. Also, gallo pinto is a dish made from rice and beans that is vegan and ubiquitous in Nicaragua, but never mentioned in the show.
Gastronomic inconsistencies and malapropisms aside, the show continued its satire of the teams' disdain for aspects of their travels in Nicaragua. For example, Hugo Sanchez told Doña Tellez that the players had upset stomachs because "well, it's Nicaragua". He concedes that this was hypocritical to say for a Mexican.
The show had another poignant moment during the subplot of Fede trying to improve the lives of his Nicaraguan family , promising a house, car, and air conditioning because he could not believe the conditions he lived in. Hugo, in his daydrinking-induced inebriated state, pointed out that he hadn't even asked his family what they needed. He was just deciding what they needed himself based on his own perception of their standard of living. I think the show was lighltly and implicitly making a point about how people like Fede or the rest of team, who might come from more privileged backgrounds, might view and approach everyday Nicaraguans. They aren't defined by just being poor and living in "the jungle".
Even so, the show doesn't shy away from highlighting some of the socioeconomic issues of Nicaragua with humor. Elvis' character, a child who has had multiple jobs from a young age to support his family and drinks alcohol, is not far from reality for many children from lower income families in Nicaragua. Elvis is also freaking hilarious and tragic as a child character who is too adult for his age. I personally consider it clever that the writers encapsulated some of the morose realities of childhood for kids like Elvis in a character as charming and hysterical as he is. Elvis, like Hugo said, was a "puto genio", but it seems with his family's economic situation this fact would have little salience in his life.
So what of the titular character? Hugo Sanchez is just as lovable, interesting, and tragic in La Balada as he was in Cuervos - perhaps even more so. We see that the only times he can ever assert himself or disagree with people around him, especially those he considered authority figures, was in a state of inebriation. After drinking the beers with Elvis, he demands that Fede go with him back to training the team, and turns on the AC. After drinking with the team after a game, he demands that the team get down from the fountain when they climb on to piss into it. We see this subservience is likely due to his upbringing and relationship with his mom, who expects implicit obedience. The series as a whole, I think, does a fantastic job of painting a fuller picture of Hugo Sanchez as a character than the hollow punchline of a person we saw in Cuervos, an inexplicably subservient and self-effacing man-slave who lived in a nursing home and had a sexual relationship with an elderly woman.
We also see a bit more of Carmelo and his hijinks with Hugo. What I loved about his involvement in the spin-off is that it adds more weight, and sadness, to his goodbye to Hugo Sanchez in the series finale.
All in all, I loved La Balada as much as I did Cuervos. After finishing the Cuervoes series with many tears in the finale, it was nice to dive right back in to a point in time in the middle of the series and get to know the characters even more. Looking forward to watching I,Potro, as the show creators seem to really know how to make a spin-off.
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