We can stop pretending that we were born with Dostoevsky under our arm, that we were going to the Cineteca watching Truffaut films since kindergarten, “Stairway to Heaven” was the lullaby that rocked us to sleep. Those of us in our thirties and forties today were educated by television. Our true lingua franca was – and still is, in truth – Always on Sundaythe first seasons of The Simpsons and the multiple programs of Paco Stanley.
Of course there were kids who boasted, smugly in their moral superiority and boredom, that there was no TV or video games in their house. But they did sneak out very early on Sundays to watch Chabelo or to challenge each other Street Fighter in it Super Nintendo when they weren’t being watched. At the other end of the spectrum of television privilege, there were those who not only had Cablevision at home, but… satellite dishes!
For the average of the middle class mortals of the ninetiescathode rays – and the threat that they would blind us if we got too close to the TV screen – They set the pace of our days: the murmur of the morning news while we were having breakfast, the marathon of cartoons in the afternoon (interrupted only by our worst enemy: ‘Political Parties’, the time allocated to commercials on open television), the prime time soap opera at nine o’clock, the evening news that was already making us sleepy.
Some of us, the luckiest ones, were allowed to see the ‘late night‘ of Veronica Castro or even, when there were issues like the NintendoNino Canún’s program.
The TV was our babysitter because the streets were full of threats and dangers: express kidnappings, runaway vans, the environmental contingency that was measured in “imecas” and killed little birds, the chupacabra, judicial police who circulated in vans without license plates and tinted windows, fresh water contaminated with the cholera bacteria. Mexico City, or rather the Federal Districtwas known as “The Defective” in a non-ironic way. Ah, those times. I’m not going to complain about what we had to live through, but… *proceeds to complain*
That same television not only normalizedbut tattooed on our soft brains the classismhe racismthe fatphobiathe homophobiathe transphobia and the misogyny that still ruin lives today. He told us that only white, thin, straight, well-behaved people deserved to appear on the screen, and that any deviation would be punished with ridicule. We thoughtlessly replicated the cruelty we saw on TV.partly as a defense mechanism, and also because critical thinking had not yet been invented, even though in History and Philosophy classes they told us it had. Aristotle? Kant? Nah,The Donkey Van Rankin and Esteban Arce!
Television imposed a unique way of being in which, paradoxically, Nobody fit in in real life.TV didn’t represent us, and instead of demanding that it did, we performed deadly stunts to try to emulate what was on it.
That’s why,Nobody will miss us is breaking it is staying rent-free in the hearts of old Mexican ‘millennials’. Because it uses today’s tools, ideas and knowledge to tell what many of us experienced yesterday: the good, the bad and the ugly.
A series about four ‘big tits’
At the beginning of August, the Mexican series premiered on Prime Nobody will miss uscreated by Adriana Pelusi (Control Z, Love and math) and Gibran Portela (Güeros). It follows five chilango teenagers who study at a private high school, neither so cool nor so tough. The story takes place in 1994that year that we keep thinking about because the country turned upside down: the EZLN uprisingthe murders of the candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and the general secretary of the PRI (and brother-in-law of the presi Salinas), Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieuthe entrance of the Free Trade Agreement and, to top it off, the “December mistake”the economic crisis.
Other Mexican series and films have reviewed and attempted to unravel the major sociopolitical events of that year, but What were everyday lives like? What were the days like when we didn’t go to school after Colosio was shot? What did we do on a Tuesday at four in the afternoon… apart from watching TV?
Thirty years later, Nobody will miss us digs into the collective memory of the chilanga middle class to recreate those times through the microcosm of a group of straight girls, four big tits and a redeemed ex-strawberry who is now tough-but-cool. A series that starts off very ‘jijiji’‘ and ‘hahaha’ and it gets darker and more painful as the chapters progress. Like adolescencewell.
Nobody will miss us It touches on topics that, in the nineties, like critical thinking, did not exist on national television, in fact, they were taboo: bullying, the problematic thing about romantic lovetalk about homosexuality and the mental healthhe adultism, sexual relations that were not a big deal and they don’t end in unplanned pregnancies or incurable infections or death and destruction or all of the above. And we know today that they would have made a difference to many of us who were neither popular nor rich nor role models.
Obviously does not portray the universal experience. Nobody is going to miss us, let’s go outside what was happening in other high schools, such as technical schools and conaleps, or even those of the UNAM, which at the end of that decade suffered an attempt at privatization that led to the strikeAnd let’s not even talk about the millions of kids who, unlike Tenoch’s character, were not a statistical exception and were left without higher secondary education due to lack of access and other factors that are better explained in documentaries.
What more could we want than everything everywhere at the same time? Mexico 1994But you have to start somewhere.
It is so not the universal experience that one of the most controversial issues about the series is being its soundtrackDoes it make sense for a fan of Duncan Dhu have not met CaifanesWhy do songs from their previous albums play and not from The nerve of the volcano? Is it feasible for a song The Cuca Have you ever been to a karaoke machine with the rudimentary technology of the nineties? Get into teams of three and discuss while listening to “Se la lleva el conejo, el conejo.”
A debt to the nineties
The millennials We old people are nostalgic for our mothers. Remembering the nineties feels like a scratchy plush blanket with a satin edge, the kind we used to cover ourselves with when winter still existed, before global warming; like a Boing (of little triangle) mango on a spring afternoon; like being invited to an afternoon party and then your crush asking you to dance; like listening to your favorite song on the radio and quickly hitting the REC button on the recorder.
That’s why Nobody will miss us is from millennials nursing homes for millennials nursing homes. It is full of winks for those of us who grew up watching TV, not only in the constant soap opera references of the character of Danielabut with a cast that we saw in Televisa:
Ernesto Laguardia, who was part of the cast of the (incredibly nerdy) youth series Cachún Cachún Ra Ra!; Anabel Ferreira, one of the only women to star in a comedy show; Gabriela Rivero, who in the last episode of the season is revealed as one of the easter eggs funniest in the series.
It’s like a splitting: a show that in the nineties would have given us hope and invaluable lessons, but there was no way it existed back then. Using the medium that marked us, televisionto tell a A story that takes us back three decadesIt’s like paying off a debt to our generation. And it feels (to use the slang of the time) great.
And speaking of debts, They owed us a fictional product with this qualitythat it was not a rehash or adaptation of some foreign series. A coming of age that was not moralizing, that did not give cringe nor guilt of seeing it.
Generations Z and Alpha are also enjoying it, but That connection that makes us obsess and write texts about it is not shared by them. Today’s teenagers don’t need it, they have access to all the cultural products of the universe on their phone. Maybe in thirty years they will make their own response to what they are experiencing: tiktoks retro? A nostalgic tour of reggaeton singers and corrido tumbados performers who are resuming their career, as in the 90’s Pop Tour?
They will see it. Because we the millennials We will already be dyingbut nobody is going to miss us.
GSC/ATJ
