That thing that over time you end up becoming your parents’ father is a fallacy. I have never thought about motherhood, but I imagine it as hopeful, a long-term project; Taking care of your parents is just the opposite. The news programs do reports about the first day of school, the children cry and the parents swallow saliva and immortalize the moment, pride attenuates the feeling of abandonment. The day you take your parents to a nursing home, there are no photos or pride, only disappointment and remorse. It is not surprising that nursing homes appear more and more frequently in fiction, the guilt of those of us who take them there and the loneliness and vulnerability of those who stay are more terrifying than any monster.
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In 2020, The mole agent represented Chile at the Oscars. Its director Maite Alberdi had in mind a documentary about the activity of private detectives, but chance put a more appetizing bone in front of her: the real investigation of an amateur spy. Octogenarian Sergio Chamy infiltrated a residence to find out if the residents were suffering abuse. Let’s see who, in the absence of a Sergio, has not wanted to install a sophisticated spy system to check how they really treat those beings who are often such unreliable narrators of their own misfortunes.
Such powerful material did not go unnoticed by Michael Schur—responsible for the comforting The Good Place— who transformed it into a series and chose Ted Danson to emulate Sergio. Danson is excessively jovial for the role, but you forget it as soon as a group of exquisite secondaries begins to parade across the screen. There is the Veronica Cartwright who spit cherries in The Witches of Eastwickthe dedicated secretary of Los Angeles Law Susan Ruttan and the elegant Margaret Avery of The color purple.
The Netflix series replaces the suspicion of abuse with a robbery, it does not allow any of the fears that those of us who regularly visit those terrifying buildings to permeate despite their impossibly homely air. The only thing that makes your skin crawl is thinking about the bill that these people pay for such a distinguished establishment. The first thing you learn when you look for the best residence you can afford is that the worst thing is not being old and dependent, it is being old, dependent and without resources. But An infiltrated man does not seek social denunciation; It is a series of smiles, a little sugar that surrounds a reality so difficult to swallow.
