Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Monarca’ On Netflix, Where A Daughter Of A Mexican Billionaire Tries To Fight A Corrupt System

Oh, billionaires. Their lives are so much more complicated than those of the unwashed masses, aren’t they? At least that’s what Peak TV wants to convey to us, via shows like Succession that show families at each others’ throats in order to get to the top of the money pile. Now, there’s a Mexican take on this genre, Monarca. Read on for more…

MONARCA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A seemingly bucolic shot of a tree in the middle of an agave field. Then a woman runs through the field in a panic, blood covering her shirt, before collapsing in shock.

The Gist: Fausto Carranza (David Rencoret) has been in charge of the Monarca corporation for many years; it’s a family-owned conglomerate that started making tequila 100 years ago but now owns hotels, a construction company and other businesses. Fausto has built Monarca over the years into the huge company it is by playing the game with the government, the cartel, and whoever helps get him what he wants. But now, after having a heart attack, Fausto wants to clean things up.

He also wants to find his successor. His son Joaquín (Juan Manuel Bernal) is in the pocket of governmental officials; Fausto thinks he’s “too far gone”. His son Andrés (Osvaldo Benavides), who is in charge of the hotel division, is harboring a longtime not-so-secret affair with a male artists. So he turns to his daughter Ana Maria (Irene Azuela), who left Hacienda de Monarca when she was a teenager after seeing something traumatic. She now lives with her family in Los Angeles and works as a journalist. He thinks it’s her sense of right and wrong and her ability to fight for what’s right that’s going to send Monarca in the right direction.

Of course, there are a lot of complications, including the fact that both Joaquín and Andrés think they should get the job. Joaquín especially thinks that the old man is losing his marbles with his selection, saying to Ana Maria that “the world doesn’t change because he wants it to. It doesn’t work that way in Mexico.” He’s spent 25 years helping his father build the company and he knows that “going clean” is a death sentence. Andrés has his own issues; he has to deflect news that the company is failing, especially when Forbes drops Monarca from its “biggest corporations in Mexico” list.

Before a family dinner at the ranch in Tequila, Ana Maria is attacked in her Guadalajara hotel, and by the time she gets to the ranch, she’s still not 100 percent sure she wants the job. An argument among Fausto’s kids flares up at a family dinner, and Fausto goes for a walk. When Ana Maria goes to find him, she finds something she never thought she’d see.

Our Take: Monarca is created by Diego Gutierrez, who has written for American series like Without A Trace, Warehouse 13 and From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series. He’s got the beats of an American drama down well. What we kept thinking, though, as we watched Monarca (where Salma Hayek is also one of the EPs) is that it felt a whole lot like an American series that’s currently on the air and generating a lot of buzz.

Yes, in many ways, Monarca is a Mexican Succession, except without the funny stuff. At first, it feels like a similar structure, with the patriarch of the family having health problems and perhaps playing his three kids off each other when it comes to who will take the reins of Monarca. We can even see Ana Maria as the Shiv equivalent, coming from outside the company and forging her own way, with her father seeing virtue in that.

But by the end of the first episode, some of that falls away as we realize the control of Monarca will be more of a free-for-all than it may seem in the first 43 minutes of episode 1. We can’t say why that is, but there’s a factor there that leads us to think that this will be Ana Maria against the world (and her corrupt brother Joaquín), with Andres somewhere in the middle.

This is supposed to be a sprawling series with a large cast; we meet everyone’s kids, and we know that Ana Maria hates the influence Joaquín has over her 18-year-old son Rodrigo (Alejandro de Hoyos Parera). But for now, we’re not supremely interested in how this turns out, as it seems like this show is full of characters we’ve seen before, and on more shows than just Succession.

Sex and Skin: Nothing at all.

Parting Shot: We find out why Ana Maria is lurching around the agave field with her shirt full of blood.

Sleeper Star: We liked Carla Adell as Ana Maria’s younger daughter Camilla, who has her mother’s sense of right and wrong, and may help guide her mother as she figures out how to clean up Monarca.

Most Pilot-y Line: The plotline of the sibling who is keeping up hetero appearances but has a secret gay lover, whose presence is scandalous, feels very retrograde and borderline homophobic. It’s also just tired.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Monarca is OK, but is full of archetypes and doesn’t show anything new.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Monarca On Netflix