Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Thursday’s Widows’ On Netflix, Where Three Deaths Reveal The Dark Side Of A Wealthy Gated Community

The “rich people being awful” genre is hot these days, but it has its limits. At a certain point, you stop really caring if these terrible people are being terrible to each other, even when that terribleness leads to death and destruction. A new Mexican series, based on a novel and Argentinian film, may have helped us reach that limit.

THURSDAY’S WIDOWS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Thursday, December 26.” We hear voices talking to each other with urgency either in or around a pool. Two teenagers stand behind a tree and shoot what’s going on one of their phones.

The Gist: The three men are acting strange, and the teens have no idea what they’re doing. Then all of a sudden there’s a commotion, we hear a zap and the lights go out. The men are suddenly floating lifeless in the water.

“When you have a wonderful life, you’d do the unspeakable to preserve it. I’m the only one who can tell them the truth,” Mavi Guevara (Cassandra Ciangherotti) writes in a journal. “Because I know everything.”

Mavi lives in and sells houses in a country club community called Los Altos de las Cascadas. A few months before this incident, she’s selling a house to a Spaniard named Gustavo Maldonado (Alfonso Bassave), who wants this to be a “surprise” for his wife Carla (Sofía Sisniega). He has to get approval by the community’s assembly, which consists of other residents, including Mavi’s friends Teresa Scaglia (Irene Azuela), Mariana Andrade (Zuria Vega), Lala de la Luna (Mayra Hermosillo) and Dorita Ramos (Elena López Fernandez).

Mariana’s husband Ernesto (Gerardo Trejoluna) is a plastic surgeon, and the two of them are always looking to change the image of their daughter Ramona (Sasha Gonzalez), whom they adopted when she was 6. She’s a t-shirt and Doc Martin-wearing girl, and Mariana wants her to dress appropriate to her status. Lala’s husband Martin (Pablo Cruz Guerrero) has left the political party his grandfather started, and is asking Teresa’s powerful husband Tano (Omar Chaparro) to help fund his run for governor. Mavi’s husband Roni (Juan Pablo Medina) grows weed after quitting a high-pressure career. Mavi is so dismayed over her husband’s situation that she lusts after the security guard that comes by her real estate office.

All the while, Ramona and Juandi (Diego Bernal), Mavi and Roni’s son, sneak around the community at night, videoing some very strange goings on that people think are going on in private.

Every Thursday, the women meet up, gossip and drink, because their husbands are playing dominoes. Mavi tells Carla that the group has come to be known as “Thursday’s Widows.” As the men play dominoes, Tano challenges the new guy, Gus, to crush his cheap watch and pick one of the expensive watches that Tano collects.

On December 26, the four husbands get together again and Tano challenges the men to stick a gun in their mouths and pull the trigger, all while bubbles are being sprayed around the pool area. At a certain point, Roni storms off, not wanting to be a part of Tano’s demented games. But the other three men start swimming around in the pool, and they’re the ones zapped when the lights go out. Roni, sitting on the railing of his balcony, falls off and severely hurts himself.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Thursday’s Widows (Original title: Las viudas de los jueves) is based on a novel and a 2009 Argentinian film The Widows Of Thursdays, but the series also has the feel of a potboiler like Desperate Housewives.

Our Take: The idea of Thursday’s Widows is that Mavi, who considers herself highly intuitive, which is what helps her be a successful real estate agent, is going to expose everything she knows about the families in her sheltered country club neighborhood after the incident that killed Tano, Gus and Martin. In each episode, we’ll flash back and see each family’s secrets, ones that may have led to the three men getting electrocuted in that pool. But what we’re not sure about is whether or not we care.

Sure, we like to see rich people’s problems. It’s the reason why shows like The White Lotus are such hits; in fact, we’re not sure if the success of that show didn’t inspire executive producer Mariana Aceves to revisit and expand upon this story. But like most shows in this genre, the writers need to create their characters in a way where we might actually want to follow them and see them experience their very first-world problems. We just don’t see that here.

No one looks remotely like “the good guy” here. Even Mavi, the show’s central character who takes it upon herself to reveal everyone’s secrets, has secrets of her own that she needs to keep, ones that are based on the fact that she’s unhappy that her husband doesn’t want to conform to the high-pressure career ambitions of every other man in this community.

Some of the stuff that comes out of people’s mouths in the first episode just seems cartoonish, like Mariana telling Ramona to not dress like the help and counting to ten when she gives her daughter what she thinks is a required hug. Teresa gets revenge on Tano postponing their private cruise trip by bringing a magician to his birthday party, which he hates. He responds by angry-fucking her on the tennis courts.

Then there’s the actual Thursday incident where the men are killed. There are things that go on that we’re not shown, because they’re going to be revealed piecemeal as the series goes along. We are not fans of those kinds of manipulations, ones where everything would be explained if we’re just shown one or two shots that are being held back. Some crazy stuff seems to happen, and the fact that we’re not shown that stuff drives us nuts. It certainly doesn’t make us want to stick around to see the pieces of the puzzle get snapped into place, given the fact that not one of the people we’ve encountered is either likable or even remotely compelling.

Sex and Skin: We already mentioned the anger-fucking, and Teresa witnesses Mavi screwing the security guard in her office. We’re sure there will be more as the show progresses.

Parting Shot: We see Teresa’s shocked face as she discovers the bodies. Mavi says in voice over, “Teresa Scaglia, I’ll start with you. The truth must be known.”

Sleeper Star: The only character we remotely want to see more of is Ramona, played by Sasha Gonzalez, mainly because her mother’s desire to make her into something she’s not is something a lot of people can relate to.

Most Pilot-y Line: There’s a scene where Ramona and Juandi observe a neighbor getting his privates licked by, well, we won’t spoil it here, but we had to rewind it to actually confirm what we saw was what we saw. And it even though much of it is implied, it’s still pretty gratuitous.

Our Call: SKIP IT. At a certain point, you get tired of watching rich people being awful, and given just how awful everyone in Thursday’s Widows is, we may have reached that point.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.