La casa de papel changed the perception of Spanish fiction internationally, demonstrating that titles with a Hollywood bill could come out of the Iberian Peninsula, and turned actors like Úrsula Corberó and Álvaro Morte into familiar faces in any corner of the planet. Finding a spiritual successor was tempting, both for the content platforms and for the media and the public, eager for thrillers with a plus of proximity. And, after saying goodbye in December 2021, we finally have a series on television that we can sell as a direct heir or, at least, as the ideal story to capture the orphaned audience of the Professor: You would do it too, that David Victori and Jordi Vallejo created for Disney.
The police respond to an emergency call from a bus driver in the direction of Manresa. They are robbing the passengers. When the agents arrive there, they find the bodies of the three robbers, the murderer has fled and there are six witnesses who say they are unable to identify him. The agents are wary of the testimonies, of those who suspect that they did see the author of the shots, at the same time that they consider what kind of man can face three criminals alone. The population is interested in the news. "The vigilante" is called by some media. "You would do it too," say users on social networks in defense of the fugitive. And the viewer of the series has no choice but to stay glued to the screen while the chase begins.
It is important to understand that when talking about You would also do so as the direct heir of Money Heist, this does not imply a lack of personality and autonomy, or the feeling that it was conceived as a substitute. Conceptually, they have similarities: they are thrillers that try to erase the distance between the hero and the villain, questioning whether breaking the law can sometimes be the right thing to do, with effective planning of the situations. With these social discourses in the background, we could almost label these fictions as populist thrillers, both for the challenging but actually comfortable message and for its commercial vocation.
Victori, as a director, takes advantage of the spaces, whether they are the night scenes set on the bus or at the police station. You don't want the viewer to relax or your visual language to lose coherence by changing scenery or moving in time (in a story with so many perspectives and where the audience often returns to the bus through testimonials, this was a risk real). And the actors, among whom are Pablo Molinero, Ana Polvorosa, Paco Tous, Elena Irureta or Michelle Jenner, are always solvent when facing extreme situations, with a camera that often seeks tension in its expressiveness.
At the script level, Victori and Vallejo also take the thriller to their field with half-hour episodes. They understand that the genre can greatly benefit from having nerve, being strict with time, not delaying situations and saying goodbye to deliveries at high points, just after presenting the enigma or conflict to be resolved. As the season progresses, you can also contemplate his intelligence when it comes to rationing some twists that are always ready to surprise (and that usually fit well with what has been told).
You would do it too is not a proposal for those looking for a complex development of the dramatic arcs (all, absolutely all, are approached in a very superficial way), a nuanced social discourse or a script that does not require leaps of faith. But, as a populist thriller, it offers punchy entertainment that has the intelligence not to drag on: it doesn't ask for more time than it needs.
