The tenth Santander Film Festival hosted the presentation of Second Season, created by Berta Prieto and Miguel Ángel Blanca. The series, which will premiere in Spain on Filmin on 27 October, is the duo’s new work after Self-Defense. We spoke to the co-creator and director.

Cineuropa: What does this series have in common with, and what sets it apart from, Self-Defense?
Miguel Ángel Blanca: Although this time, the writing has been more rigorous (and precisely because of that), recklessness and improvisation are still our way of approaching things. Second Season is more ambitious on a narrative level. We’ve moved on from the little games of a frivolous sitcom to build characters shot through with more complex moral contradictions. Now, the comedy we’re crafting is so awkward that you don’t even dare to laugh at it: it’s a drama about the need to feel a little special in a broken, sad, schizoid city.

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Does it have one specific genre, or is it fluid?
Each episode is different from the last to the extent that we’ve made seven distinct films. Every episode sabotages and dismantles the previous one. For example, the second is narrated through an analogue roll of photos from a disposable camera; the fourth is like the nightmare Bergman had after watching Inland Empire high on Sprite with added codeine; and the fifth is shot vertically like an event streamed on Instagram Live. So yes, we’re dealing with a (narrative) genre-fluid series, as it draws unabashedly from the world of influencers and the language of the internet, but from a strong cinephile bedrock. It’s worth asking ourselves how social networks can infect more classical audiovisual languages, and where their compatibilities lie. Not only aesthetically, but also narratively and morally. We’re at a point where our infinite scrolling on Instagram and TikTok has infected our reality and the way we tell it - how we switch context, tone and genre at scrolling speed, meme culture, the anxiety of going viral… All of this should affect the storytelling paradigm, and it’s something we’ve flirted with in the series.

Success, second chances and failure seem to be the core themes here. Do these issues reflect today’s world?
The meaning of "today’s world" has changed three times while you’ve been reading this sentence - and with it, its values. It’s exciting, but it can drive you mad if you take it seriously. Second Season starts with a writer who was the voice of a generation, who was fresh and effervescent, and who a few years later has gone out of fashion, has become irrelevant to that “today’s world” and has to survive as a ghostwriter for influencers. Success is the biggest of ghosts and has morphed into today’s romantic love: everyone thinks they need it, that it’s possible and that they deserve it. Starting from that idea, we prod at contemporary soufflés about the notion of failure, the fear of success because it can vanish at any moment, about whether being authentic or “real” has any value, about monetising trauma, about whether it’s possible to have an artistic career or whether we can only exist by being a trend while we’re young, about the acceptance of toxic relationships and so on. The series keeps fracturing until it embraces the tragedy of being unable to find one’s own artistic voice, the confirmation that you are a slave to your own narrative and will only ever be what others expect of you, inevitably turning you into a meme, even if you’re talented. This is something we’ve been seeing a lot in our cultural landscape, especially in the auteur cinema star system.

Is the series a reflection of the quarter-life crisis or of Gen Z?
In episode six, the protagonist played by Berta Prieto reflects on how every generation thinks it’s living through a crucial moment… But, in the end, they all have the same desires and frustrations. Gen Z is having its moment of social engagement after a few years of well-deserved frivolity. But the same frustrations are arriving now that they’re nearing 30 and have to admit that the dream of youth is over. In the end, the central character admits she’s tired of yearning and wishes she could have low-key ambitions so that nothing would be too important.