Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Influencer’ On Netflix, A Telenovela About A Disgraced Influencer Helping A Businessman Whose Late Father Had Enemies

The Influencer is a telenovela from Colombia that is pretty old-fashioned, despite the fact that the title and the main character is very 2020s. Yes, the main character is a young social media influencer whose life gets turned upside down by a stunt gone wrong that goes viral. But it’s a pretty classic love story between two unlikely people, with the standard obstacles and other impediments to ultimate romance getting int he way.

THE INFLUENCER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A young woman sits in front of a mirror with a tongue depressor on her lips, trying to not speak with her usual speech impediment.

The Gist: Maritza (Mariana Gomez) is an influencer, who has done enough on social media to get deals with a few companies and earn herself a college scholarship. She lives with her father Nibardo (Carlos “Pitty” Camacho), his wife Yesenia (Andrea Guzman) and her two half-brothers. Yesenia thinks that Maritza is a freeloader, even though Maritza is very grateful that she opened her house to her, despite being a product of an affair between Nibardo and her mother. Nibardo hates that Maritza and Yesenia always have harsh words for each other, but does seem to agree with his wife that Maritza won’t get anywhere as an influencer.

Her boyfriend Germen (Edwin Maya) has a huge idea for a video that he thinks will go viral for both of them, and Maritza asks her best friend Teddy (Camilo Amores) for access to the building where he works. After a lot of shenanigans that involve posing as couriers then Teddy letting them hide out until nightfall, Maritza and Germen barely evade security as they dash up to the roof of the building. He puts a harness and helmet on Maritza, for safety, and has her dance near the ledge while he videos it. Then, without warning, he pushes her off the ledge. As she hangs from a rope on the side of the building, safe but scared out of her mind, Germen makes off with her phone.

Maritza gets arrested, but she insists she knew nothing about this stunt. However, as Germen predicted, the video goes viral, and people all over are making their own “Maritza’s Rope Challenge” videos. Maritza is mortified and feels betrayed by Germen, and officially breaks up with him when she goes to get her phone back.

In Miami, Salvador (Juan Manuel Mendoza) makes a presentation to doubting executives about implementing a social media plan. One of the executives is the father of his girlfriend Avril (Luna Baxter), and Salvador has a nagging feeling that his advancement at the company is more due to who he’s with rather than what he does. He gets a call from his father, just as he sees an influencer trash his family’s pizzeria chain on her YouTube channel. His father tells him that he has more dire news and has to tell him in person. Before he gets a chance to tell Salvador, however, he dies from a heart attack.

When Salvador gets to Colombia, he finds out from his mother Treresa (Marcela Agudelo) that the pizzeria chain was about to go bankrupt and that his father was going to need to sell to his archrival, Aldo Suarez (Leonardo Acosta). What she doesn’t tell him is that she’s having an affair with Aldo, and that she refinanced the company with Aldo’s financier then defaulted on purpose. Salvador refuses to sell Aldo the one thing that his father was allowed to keep, which was the original restaurant in the chain; he intends on making it into a new business.

The fame Maritza was getting, which she didn’t embrace to begin with, takes a bad turn when a teen gets badly injured doing his version of the rope challenge. As Maritza quickly goes from viral to a social media pariah, she starts losing the deals she had as an influencer, and the money she’s owed gets yanked off the table. But then she walks into Salvador’s new restaurant, looking for work as a social media expert. He’s seen her sincere apology for the young man’s injury and believes her; it seems like this might be a good match.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Influencer is a romantic telenovela along the lines of All For Love.

Our Take: The opening credit sequence to The Influencer has Gomez and Mendoza singing a pretty on-the-nose theme song about the show’s story while we see romantic scenes from the first season play out. Not only that, but the show’s subtitle is “A Love Story To Like.” So the series doesn’t hide much about where its 16-episode first season is going. But it does a good job in its first hour giving us a sense of just who to root for and against.

There isn’t a heck of a lot of character shading in this show, but there never is in a classic telenovela. But Gomez is very likable as Maritza, who loves her father and tells him he’s been the best to her and made her want for nothing, and is sincerely pained by the fact that the rope challenge led to someone getting badly hurt. She may dress like a typical Gen Z influencer, but she seems to have the unyielding empathy we hear that generation has in spades. We also liked Amores as her bestie Teddy, who knew that Germen was bad news before she did.

We don’t quite have as good a handle on Salvador’s side of the story. First of all, he seems to be significantly older than Maritza and they don’t seem to be each other’s type, but we know they’re destined to fall for each other. But other than that, his side of the story seems like a pretty typical telenovela business rivalry story, rife with affairs and secrets. Will we find out more about him as the show goes on? Of course. But it does seem that the first episode spent more time making Maritza into a rounded character than it did with Salvador.

Sex and Skin: None, and given that the show is rated TV-14, we likely won’t get much of either.

Parting Shot: When Maritza tells Salvador that she’s there to help him and asks what she can do, he asks, “Would you die and come back to life?”

Sleeper Star: It seems that most of Marcela Agudelo has to do as Teresa is give looks that says, “Boy, if Salvador finds out what I’m hiding, he’ll hate me for life,” and yet she manages to make that into a real-seeming character.

Most Pilot-y Line: Uh, the places that owed Maritza money still needed to pay her, even if they didn’t want to be associated with her anymore. She seemed to take that bit of breach of contract a bit too easily.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Influencer is a pleasant, romantic telenovela that will show the main couple navigate conflicts small and large on their journey. We just wonder how the writers are going to make Maritza and Salvador into a believable-looking couple.

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.