In all our years doing this work, we don’t remember a time where we’ve recommended what’s ostensibly a less-than-good show because the first episode needs to be seen to be believed. But, there’s a first time for everything, as we found out as we watched the first episode to a new Mexican drama on Netflix.
Opening Shot: People on horses chase a woman through the desert. They finally surround her, and one of the people on horseback lassos her.
The Gist: Perla Guerra (Ana Serradilla) is the woman being lassoed, caught by her sister Antonia (Claudia Álvarez). She’s angry that Perla won’t do IVF and carry a baby for her. After all, thinks Antonia, it’s the least Perla can do after Antonia caught her husband Bernardo (Christian Tappan) having sex with Perla on their wedding day. In addition, Perla caused an auto accident that day that made Antonia infertile.
Because Perla refuses, Antonia has no choice but to tie Perla up in a cave and force Bernardo to impregnate her.
Perla’s police detective boyfriend Efraín (Erick Elías) wants to go after them, but Perla knows that Bernardo’s family is too powerful.
Perla ends up pregnant and has a daughter; she refuses to give the baby up, but Antonia orders her henchman to kidnap Perla and take the baby. Perla manages to take the baby back, but not only does her sister send a henpecked Bernardo to take the baby from Perla, Bernardo then says that the baby died and pretends to bury her in a remote grave. Antonia then has Perla arrested for kidnapping; she drops the charges but orders her sister to leave town.
Four years later, Antonia is having a hard time with the girl, whom she named Jacinta, because she reminds her too much of her sister. While Bernardo tries to protest that Antonia should follow through on the mess she started, he relents on the idea of bringing Jacinta to an orphanage; the girl, already distraught that her parents are abandoning her, watches as they adopt a boy named Pedro.
Thirteen years later, a teenage Jacinta (Ana Valeria Becerril), still at the orphanage due to Bernardo paying to keep her there, finally makes a break for it. She changes her identity, but immediately runs into trouble when she kills a man who tries to rape her.
Four years after that, Efraín finds Perla, who’s working in a strip club, and tells her that Jacinta is still alive, serving a 15-year prison sentence for killing her attacker. The two hatch a scheme that would get Perla into the prison so she can find Jacinta.
All of this happens in the first, 40-minute episode of Sisters’ Feud.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Sisters’ Feud (original title: Las Hermanas Guerra; this means Sisters At War, which would have been a much better title), is about as crazy a show as we’ve seen, even crazier than shows like The Surrogacy.
Our Take: We didn’t mention a few, smaller bits of craziness in the insane first episode of Sisters’ Feud, like a grown-up Pedro (Bernardo Flores), who is set to inherit Bernardo’s family fortune, is given a year or so to live if he doesn’t get a kidney transplant from his birth family, or the fact that Perla finds out about Jacinta through her sister’s dying housekeeper, who was a confidant.
That is a whole lot of plot to rocket through in 40 minutes, and it doesn’t leave a heck of a lot of time for character development. Antonia is pure molten evil, and everyone in her orbit bends to her will, including Bernardo. Somehow, even though it’s Bernardo’s family with the money and power, he seems to be powerless to Antonia, who seems to be such a genius that he forces him to rape her sister, then threatens to use the rape against him years later if he defies her. Perla swings from distraught to angry and back again, and Jacinta for now is a full-on ball of anger, given how terrible her life has been.
All of these characters are archetypes with no gradations or subtleties. Normally, we’d decry this, but we give the show’s writers with having the intestinal fortitude to dispense with all that character stuff and just push one big plot development after another. As we watched the first episode, mouth agape, we went from hating the show to damn near admiring just how much plot was jammed into one episode, and how insane most of those plot points were.
We think we got to that point when Jacinta was just casually dropped off at an orphanage, with Pedro being picked up by Jacinta’s parents as the little girl watched. That was a moment that seemed to be ridiculous for even a telenovela-style series like Sisters’ Feud, and we were wondering why the actress playing young Jacinta wasn’t instructed to wail and scream while she watched herself getting replaced. Jacinta seemed weirdly sad but resigned to her fate, which is quite a complex emotion for a 4-year-old.
But that was just one of what seemed like a dozen different ridiculous situations that would have made lesser people, like Job, throw up their hands in despair. It made us wonder if the writers just spent a week trying to one up each other’s ideas, and they all went into the first episode.
Can this level of insanity continue? We hope not; that would be exhausting to watch. But we do give everyone involved in this show credit for taking one huge swing after another and not at all being apologetic about it.
Sex and Skin: See above. There are rapes and attempted rapes, and Bernardo cheating on Antonia.
Parting Shot: Perla finally finds Jacinta, hooked to an IV in the prison infirmary.
Sleeper Star: Claudia Álvarez is amazingly nasty as the evil Antonia, and she sports a championship-level set of bangs.
Most Pilot-y Line: As Perla describes her depressing life to Efraín, she concludes by saying, “I’m still alive only because I don’t have the strength to die.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. Sister’s Feud isn’t a good show. But its first episode is so crazy that you need to see it to appreciate how crazy it actually is.
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.
