Street gangs facing each other. Corrupt police. Love stories. Teenage motherhood. Kidnappings. Deaths. And above all, a family and a neighborhood. Intervías has seen almost everything in its four seasons. Today, Monday, the Telecinco series ends, and it does so, according to David Bermejo, its creator, in the only way it could.
The story starring Jose Coronado was born as a request from Telecinco to maintain the good results that the collaboration of the scriptwriter and producer Aitor Gabilondo with the actor had given. Live without permission y The Prince They had been great ratings successes on the channel, and they wanted to maintain that bond. The request was to set the action in Madrid and it occurred to them to take the story to a neighborhood, and for the protagonist to have a granddaughter of oriental origin. Those were the threads with which screenwriter David Bermejo began to work. And from there he built the three levels in which this story has developed: the neighborhood, the family and the thriller.
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Last week Bermejo recalled the five years (“one alone and four accompanied”) that he has spent working in Intervías and the difficulties that, contrary to what could be expected from the ingredients indicated above, he encountered in the beginning and that made him fear that, on this occasion, the formula might not work. “Fiction on free-to-air television no longer worked like before, plus the pandemic caught us and we didn’t know if they were going to cancel everything. “We were a little scared,” he says by phone. “It had the feeling of being a Cinderella series, we were not very clear what was going to happen, we had great actors but a priori we were poorly equipped for success.” In 2022, Telecinco broadcast two seasons of the series in a row, 16 episodes, and things worked: the first season achieved an average of 1,809,000 viewers and the second, 1,663,000.
Manolo Caro and Jose Coronado, in ‘Entrevías’.
The third season, broadcast in 2023, and the fourth and current installment have had much more discreet figures, although the network no longer has the audience data that it had a few years ago. In the fourth season, only one episode has exceeded 700,000 viewers. However, in parallel with its broadcast on open television, Intervías has become a small phenomenon on Netflix, where each installment that has been posted has managed to sneak into the most watched in Spain and has garnered good data in the rest of the world, above original Spanish productions on the platform.
The journey of Tirso Abantos, that ex-military man who runs a neighborhood hardware store and who suddenly begins to live with a granddaughter with whom he barely had contact, concludes with the eighth episode of the fourth season. Bermejo reviews the evolution of the character: “The series was intended as a love story between a grandfather and his granddaughter. It is the story of the failure of prejudices and how this man who lives closed in on himself, thanks to friction, opens up.” They designed that opening path for 16 episodes, that is, the first two seasons. When the series was renewed for another 16 episodes, new characters and new plots came into action. Furthermore, the protagonist no longer had that sullen character from the beginning. To return him to the starting point, the end of the third season had a fatal blow in store for him.
Luis Zahera is Ezequiel in ‘Entrevías’.
The last season has chronicled Tirso’s search for internal and family peace and, at the same time, revenge. “The ending is consistent with the approach of the series and the character. There are things that you don’t find, they find you, and that has happened with the end of the series. I think the ending was the one that was going to be seen and there were no other options,” says its creator. They neither wrote nor recorded more endings, as some fictions have done: they were clear about it. Bermejo remembers the recording of the farewell and how everyone on the set experienced it in a different way, from Michelle Calvó’s inconsolable tears to the speech Jose Coronado made or how Luis Zahera disappeared from the place because he doesn’t like goodbyes.
The formula for success Intervíaswhether on free-to-air television or on a platform, and whether in Spain or the rest of the world, is something that its creator misses. “It has that substratum of truth, a portrait of part of society that never appears in series, with the normal problems that can exist on the street. Being very local, it is very universalizable, because the problems of immigration, the problems of integrating, hunger lines, violence, are problems that are everywhere. It feels very true because we don’t try to sweeten the sets or the places, we look for the beauty of the ugliness of the suburbs. There is also the ability to make a thriller addictive, with a lot of rhythm and high endings, and the emotional and family part and the comedy. In series it is always a conjunction of elements. “The stars aligned and it was our turn.”
