Machos Alfa
Alpha Males works because its protagonists are almost always late.
Late to understand their partners.
Late to understand certain social changes.
Late to realize that many of the rules they grew up with no longer work.
And they keep trying.
Usually badly.
The third season preserves what I like most about the series: Alberto and Laura Caballero deal with masculinity, relationships, feminism, sex, new family structures and changing social expectations without turning each episode into a lecture.
Comedy comes first.
Reflection can come afterwards.
That matters.
It would be very easy to create four sexist men simply so the audience could laugh at them from a position of superiority. Alpha Males does something more interesting. Pedro, Luis, Raúl and Santi say ridiculous things, make terrible decisions and carry plenty of outdated assumptions, but they remain recognizable human beings.
They are not monsters.
They are men trying to adapt to a world that has moved faster than they have.
That is where much of the humor comes from.
The joke is often not that they are simply stupid, but that they try to apply a new idea using the same old mechanisms. They may have learned the vocabulary without necessarily understanding what lies behind it.
The four actors also work extremely well together. Gorka Otxoa, Fernando Gil, Raúl Tejón and Fele Martínez have the kind of chemistry that makes years of friendship believable, especially when one character says something terrible and the other three somehow manage to make it worse.
But the series would fail if the women existed merely to correct them.
They do not.
María Hervás, Kira Miró, Raquel Guerrero and the rest of the female cast play characters who also make mistakes, contradict themselves and have their own needs and insecurities.
Nobody has the instruction manual.
That is essential.
The show mocks obvious sexism, but it is equally willing to laugh at performative progressiveness, fashionable vocabulary and the modern urge to place a label on absolutely everything.
That lack of solemnity suits it.
Not every gag works. The Caballeros still enjoy pushing situations well beyond plausibility, and some conflicts clearly exist because the writers want to reach maximum chaos.
But that is part of their comic language.
And when it works, it works very well.
Underneath the exaggeration lies something surprisingly recognizable: people in middle age discovering that some things they considered normal for decades perhaps never were.
And having to rebuild themselves while working, raising children, separating, dating and continuing to meet the same old friends.
That is much more interesting than a simple battle between men and women.
Alpha Males is really about the fear of being left behind.
About discovering that the world keeps updating while you are still trying to understand the previous version.
And it laughs at everyone involved.
Sometimes you laugh at these four men.
Then, half a second later, you think:
damn, I've done that too.
Late to understand their partners.
Late to understand certain social changes.
Late to realize that many of the rules they grew up with no longer work.
And they keep trying.
Usually badly.
The third season preserves what I like most about the series: Alberto and Laura Caballero deal with masculinity, relationships, feminism, sex, new family structures and changing social expectations without turning each episode into a lecture.
Comedy comes first.
Reflection can come afterwards.
That matters.
It would be very easy to create four sexist men simply so the audience could laugh at them from a position of superiority. Alpha Males does something more interesting. Pedro, Luis, Raúl and Santi say ridiculous things, make terrible decisions and carry plenty of outdated assumptions, but they remain recognizable human beings.
They are not monsters.
They are men trying to adapt to a world that has moved faster than they have.
That is where much of the humor comes from.
The joke is often not that they are simply stupid, but that they try to apply a new idea using the same old mechanisms. They may have learned the vocabulary without necessarily understanding what lies behind it.
The four actors also work extremely well together. Gorka Otxoa, Fernando Gil, Raúl Tejón and Fele Martínez have the kind of chemistry that makes years of friendship believable, especially when one character says something terrible and the other three somehow manage to make it worse.
But the series would fail if the women existed merely to correct them.
They do not.
María Hervás, Kira Miró, Raquel Guerrero and the rest of the female cast play characters who also make mistakes, contradict themselves and have their own needs and insecurities.
Nobody has the instruction manual.
That is essential.
The show mocks obvious sexism, but it is equally willing to laugh at performative progressiveness, fashionable vocabulary and the modern urge to place a label on absolutely everything.
That lack of solemnity suits it.
Not every gag works. The Caballeros still enjoy pushing situations well beyond plausibility, and some conflicts clearly exist because the writers want to reach maximum chaos.
But that is part of their comic language.
And when it works, it works very well.
Underneath the exaggeration lies something surprisingly recognizable: people in middle age discovering that some things they considered normal for decades perhaps never were.
And having to rebuild themselves while working, raising children, separating, dating and continuing to meet the same old friends.
That is much more interesting than a simple battle between men and women.
Alpha Males is really about the fear of being left behind.
About discovering that the world keeps updating while you are still trying to understand the previous version.
And it laughs at everyone involved.
Sometimes you laugh at these four men.
Then, half a second later, you think:
damn, I've done that too.
Mini Review: Alpha Males works because its protagonists are almost always late. Late to understand their partners. Late to understand certain social changes. Late to realize that many of the rules they grew up with no longer work. And they keep trying. Usually badly. The third season preserves what I like most about the series: Alberto and Laura Caballero deal with masculinity, relationships, feminism, sex, new family structures and changing social...
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