BarcelonaThe afternoon series are light, easy to follow and have very engaging plots. Since 2017 Like it was yesterday accompanies the digestions of Catalans and since its premiere has led the audience in its broadcast slot. The seventh season, which ends this Sunday with a special episode that is broadcast in the schedule of prime time, has accumulated an average of 215,000 viewers per day and has reached a share of 16.6%, a figure higher than the TV3 average, which in June was 12.9%. The most watched episode of the season was the one on Friday, July 12, with an average of 333,000 viewers and a share of 23.2%.
The telenovela is also successful on the 3Cat platform, where it has accumulated more than 20.4 million views, making it one of the most watched content. Like it was yesterday heads all the targets between the ages of 25 and 75 during its airtime, so it’s not surprising that at least one person around you is watching it. Laura Miquel is one of those people: “I love looking at all the snakes from TV3 and I didn’t consider the option of not watching this one, even if the plot didn’t interest me,” he confesses.
At the beginning of the series, Laura Miquel watched it every evening with her flatmates and they were all big fans: “In fact, our WhatsApp group was called Bar Flora in reference to the bar in the series”, she explains. And it is that one of the particularities of Like it was yesterday is that the characters spend a lot of time drinking coffee, making vermouth or nibbling something at Flora and La Iaia, establishments of reference for the Reina Sibil·la gang. “It seems that there are only two bars in Barcelona and they go there every day spent, isn’t anyone working?” comments the viewer. For his part, Carles Mallol, one of the co-creators of the plots, explains that the fact that the characters spend a lot of time in cafes and bars “is one of the assumed particularities for the viewers and means that we don’t have to explain every day why they do it; we know we have sets and sets where the stories have to happen.”
The ‘bible’ of Like it was yesterday
The writing team of Like it was yesterday it is composed of 12 professionals and is divided into three sections through which they rotate: la Bible, the stairs and the dialogues. The Bible it’s called that because the plot of the entire season is written into it. It is, therefore, where stories are created. We think a year before we start writing the season and the team that works on it is made up of three people who change every quarter “to give more vidilla to the plot”. Often screenwriters external to the series also participate, “who bring a new look to the plot and thus new stories emerge”, points out Mallol. “There are moments when I think: “Oysters, here the screenwriters they have shown off, it seems that they play who says it the fattest and that they have taken the most surreal idea to put it in the series. It’s fantastic”, explains Miquel.
Then there is the ladder team, in charge of building each chapter from the stories written in the Bible: “They organize the plot material to make the five episodes that are broadcast every week and these are the ones that start working three months before the broadcast”, explains the screenwriter. This whole process ends with the dialogue team, who, as the name suggests, are the ones who give shape to the characters’ lines. For him, the funnest part is the team meetings twice a week to manage the stories: “Our ritual is to strip down – not physically – and we’ve built up a confidence and a level of creativity that they allow us to tell stories that work and have rhythm,” he says.
Drama, comedy and feelings
The seventh season has dealt with topics such as foster families, separations or sexual abuse. Mallol says that the series did not start out as social as it is now, but that it has grown and transformed. “As we progressed in the construction of bibles we realized that we are a very important speaker and we want to take advantage of it to talk about stories with which the viewers can reflect”. From Miquel’s point of view, a Like it was yesterday these issues have always been present: “They have been there from the beginning, they do it quite well. For example, with the rape of Silvia last season, which obviously had a very beastly echo. But it has also been talked about of issues of abuse or drugs, as with the character of Litus, and there was also a season where Eva had a stalker, or when Andreu contracted HIV,” he explains. Anna Manso, screenwriter of the series, adds that the plot of Sílvia’s rape, during which consent was also discussed, coincided in the media with the trial of Dani Alves for rape, which has happened again this season: “The plot of Maties’ sexual abuse was broadcast when the subject was discussed again in the documentary that was broadcast on TV3. The fact that it happened twice means that we have sharpened our aim,” he declares.
Like it was yesterday he also works on many stories of love and feelings, such as betrayal between friends, separations or fraternal relationships. “In these eight years, the level of detail and psychological analysis of some characters forces us to squeeze our brains to look for small nuances of the characters,” the screenwriter emphasizes. Since their first appearance on screen, the characters have changed and evolved, partly also thanks to the nuances given to them by the performers. After 7 years, the team has come to love characters like Marta, “who has had a very beautiful evolution and has been able to open her arms to be Joel’s host family, or Andreu, a boomer 50-year-old misplaced played by Marc Cartes, who until now had always been the handsome man in Catalonia,” says Manso.
The daily series allow to give much more breadth and depth to the topics they deal with because since five episodes must be broadcast every week, the stories need to be extended over time. “We can’t make them very fast, we’d run out of material and we’d have to invent 25 million more every quarter,” says Mallol. This is why, for example, the story of Maties’ abuse has lasted an entire quarter and its impact on the plot has been great. However, it can sometimes feel like the stories drag on too long and move slowly. “With some stories I do think: ‘That’s enough, isn’t it?’ But others go too fast and I think that, because of what happened, the person should be traumatized for life, but no, after two weeks he has already recovered,” says Miquel.
Final chapter of the season
The special chapter at the end of the season and the first of the following are some of the things that are already being considered in the Bible: “We try that from the initial argument there is some excuse that makes everything revolve around this, be it a burial, an excursion, a disappearance… We look for some mechanism that can generate a more cinematic structure than the rest of chapters, which are essentially multi-plots,” explains Mallol. These special episodes are always the ones that surprise the viewer the most. “The death of Quim at the end of last season was surreal. My partner didn’t think he had died, but I knew he had because the actor wanted to leave the series,” explains Miquel. In fact, his death was not planned at all Bible, which changed the plans of the screenwriters, who were the ones who decided his fate. “We could have sent him to Mallorca, but since we don’t kill anyone in this series, we decided to do it to see what consequences it would have,” explains the screenwriter.
Mallol points out that the argument at the beginning of the new season was rewritten several times “not because it wasn’t good, but because we thought that, being the eighth, we should give it another go. This does not mean that there will be car chases, but we toot our horns to make a little bit of a difference.” Manso adds, “There will be a lot of drama, comedy and also a comeback – fans of Like it was yesterday“. And about the final chapter of the seventh season, he says that the viewer “can expect something that is not expected”.
Source: www.ara.cat
