Luxury, lies and loss
If you like to watch stories about seemingly-perfect wealthy families living in opulent homes, dressed in designer wear, travelling business class, nibbling on expensive entrees washed down by vintage drinks, being horrible to anyone who doesn’t belong to their clique but still deeply unhappy despite all the wealth and opportunities in the world, you will enjoy Thursday Widows, a Mexican series, based on a Clarin prize-winner novel Las viudas de los Jueves by an Argentian writer Claudia Piñeiro, which was earlier adapted by an Argentinian-Spanish film about certain deaths that happen in a gated community in upper-class Mexico.
Living in a lavish residential space of Los Cascadas, supposedly an hour out of Mexico, five families flaunt their luxurious lifestyles. They religiously follow a ritual of weekly meetings on Thursdays, where the husbands have a stag night at the Scaglia house to play dominoes and vent, while the wives enjoy their own gathering at the country club where they gossip and pass snide remarks to each other. Since they are sans husbands at this weekly meet, they call themselves ‘Thursday’s Widows.’ Little did they know, they were to become Thursday’s widows in a plan of destiny.
On one fatal stag night of Thursday, December 26, life changes for everybody in Los Cascadas with the advent of chilling events. The story is narrated by Mavi, one of the residents of this posh community.
The death of three men around which the stories revolve are a centre-point for the story and the scenes related to it run in the beginning, middle, and the end of the series so that the director makes sure that you don’t forget for a second about how, why and when those men died because there was a story behind each character that led to those deaths.
The series begins with two teenagers Ramona and Juandi who are peering from behind a tree, and start shooting what they can see happening in the pool, on one of their phones. They belong to the Los Cascadas families and enjoy sneaking around the community at night, videoing random stuff that people do when they are certain no one is watching them.
In the pool are three men [who they know well] behaving strangely. Some splashing follows, a loud zap sound is heard and the lights around the pool go out. Suddenly, the men in the pool become dead bodies floating in the water. You wonder, who each of these men were, and why they died in the pool because there were no guns and no shooters.
From this point, you are inevitably hooked [if that hasn’t happened already] as now follow the in-depth stories of each Los Cascadas family. The characterisation is rich, realistic and relatable.
In the first episode, you catch a glimpse of the life of the five main families who live in the super-posh preserved and protected community at the Los Cascadas. As each episode focusses on one family, we can see that wives are the protagonists. While the structure of the series is unique, the stories of the wives are not like the ones in Desperate Housewives, Bollywood Wives or The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. In Thursday Widows, there is a darkness about the lives of these wives because of the way their husbands’ lives are, and the parents’ messed- up lives cast shadows on the children’s lives in a trickle-down effect.
Of course, the women live with their husbands in Los Cascadas, because they love their materialistic lives and values way more than peace and happiness. Whether they know what contentment is, one wonders while watching the series.
This particular attribute is common to a certain segment in the society just about anywhere and hence the Mexican series becomes extremely relatable for us. What happened to them could happen with any bunch of families anywhere in the world in that type of setting.
This portrayal of the upper-class Mexican society is insightful with their shallow adoration of money, intrinsic fear of losing it, subtle but consistent and deep-rooted mistreatment of domestic help which obviously comes from the lower class, along with the occasional manifestation of empathy that they carry out as a feel-good activity or for an organised community event for charity and good-will. This again resonates very well with the wealthy class anywhere in the world.
Mavi Guevara (Cassandra Ciangherotti), a real estate agent for Los Altos de las Cascadas is the narrator of the story because having sold houses to most of the families, she knows them well. Her husband Roni (Juan Pablo Medina) grows weed after chucking a high-pressure career away and lounges around the house the whole day while she works hard. A lot of women will relate to her thoughts while coming home one day after work, “If I were a man and spent all day at work, I would come home to dinner and I wouldn’t have to take care of kids.”
One day she sells a house to a Spaniard named Gustavo Maldonado (Alfonso Bassave), who wants to surprise his wife Carla (Sofía Sisniega) with the beautiful house. He wants Carla to be a trophy wife, but her aspirations to live, breathe and work make him insecure, toxic and violent.
Each prospective buyer has to be approved by the community’s assembly, which consists of other residents, including Mavi’s friends Teresa Scaglia (Irene Azuela) who can’t stop working out and has marital issues with her powerful husband Tano Scaglia (Omar Chaparro); Mariana Andrade (Zuria Vega) married to Ernesto (Gerardo Trejoluna) a plastic surgeon and Lala de la Luna (Mayra Hermosillo) married to a failing politician who was born into the luxurious life of Los Cascadas, is married to Martin (Pablo Cruz Guerrero) who has left his ancestral political party. Martin wants Teresa’s powerful husband Tano to help fund his run for governor.
Mariana’s and Ernesto are always looking to change the image of their adopted daughter Ramona (Sasha Gonzalez), whom they adopted when she was six. Incidentally, she looks more like domestic help and nothing like her Mariana who is so obsessive about her looks and body that in her quest to look perfect, she is forever under her husband’s surgical knife. They want Ramona to change her nose, and dress like Marianna but Ramona is not happy with her adoptive parents mainly because of their shallow attitude.
As the series tackles five different families, it might get a bit tedious to keep track of the thread of each character in the story but the pacing and structure is pretty neat as it helps to remember the characters and their complexities and respective stories.
While the notion of delving into the lives of the affluent is not entirely unprecedented, but in a society twisted with prejudices against women, there couldn’t have been a subtler expression to tell the hard truth that in every social class in every country in the world, generally women go through the same matrimonial, family and career issues.
There is enough intrigue, suspense and foreboding in the lives of these gorgeous women and their husbands to keep you hooked despite the slightly dark and depressing vibe of the show because of the three deaths. Neither does Thursday’s Widows shy away from delivering heartrending moments that provide ample food for thought.
It explores a variety of themes, from societal commentary to the darker aspects of personal lives at a deep, emotional level. We don’t know any of the actors because they are Mexican or Spanish, but they know their craft as the performances are brilliant. Spoilers ahead as I proceed to discuss the end. This is the point when you can stop reading if you want to go binge and tackle the mystery of the deaths yourself, if not, read on.
The symbolism of Thursday’s Widows is captured beautifully in the last episode. The deaths happened because three of the husbands had failed in one way or the other to continue to provide the luxurious lifestyle to their families and were headed for troubled times, while Gustavo is just dying with guilt after his wife Carla abandons him following some horrible domestic violence.
Tano Scaglia who had tried to kill himself a few times by shooting himself in the mouth, came up with a unique idea to give back to the families and was trying to convince all the husbands that they owed to their families to kill themselves in such a way that the life insurance would benefit their families and, in this way, the families could carry on undisturbed in their opulent lives. While one husband walks out, refusing to agree to Tano Scaglia, two of them team up with Tano to get in the pool.
The most important scene of the show, which is the pool-death scene runs a few times in the series, but in the sixth or last episode, it runs in complete detail. It is created in such a way that the finale leaves you wondering if Tano Scaglia planned the proceedings to look like an accident so that the wives could claim insurance after the deaths or was it really an accident? Tano’s tiny scuffle with Gustavo in the pool suggests he killed Gustavo just before Martin and he died because of the electricity shock. Did Tano’s snow-flake machine, bought to add fake snowy ambience to their Thursday night get-togethers, fall in the pool by accident or was it deliberately placed in such a way that it would fall in the pool and kill them?
This way or that, the premise for the second season is set and I can’t wait for it. Given that the first season premiered in September last year and not only quickly earned itself a place in Netflix’s Top 10 TV Shows in the US, but sat tight at #4 within its first 24 hours on the platform, another season promises a lot of potential.