Hache

Hache | Tráiler oficial | Netflix
A fun little series about crazy people running around Barcelona back in the 1960's. Hache is Spanish for the letter H. H is for Helena, the lead trouble maker. It also stands for heroin, which is what is fueling all this mayhem. Down-on-her-luck Helena gets in a fight in a fancy nightclub and catches the eye of the proprietor who takes possession of her, except Helena isn't going to be possessed. Yeah, so we've got a bit of a conflict between two people who are attracted to each other for different reasons. Malpica, the proprietor comes from money, he has some property around town, but he is heavy in the heroin business, facilitating the transshipment of hundreds of kilos on it's way from Iran to the USA. Marseilles used to be the center of this, but things have gotten a little difficult there, so Barcelona is picking up the slack. Lucky Luciano makes an appearance at a conference of his cohorts at a hotel in Marseilles where they have taken over the whole hotel. That's one way to keep hoi polloi out of the way.

Several of the main characters are addicted to heroin and Malpica uses morphine on regular basis to control the pain in his bullet damaged leg. I was going to say 'war damaged leg' but this was the sixties, was there any kind of war going on?

After World War II Spain was politically and economically isolated, and was kept out of the United Nations. This changed in 1955, during the Cold War period, when it became strategically important for the US to establish a military presence on the Iberian Peninsula as a counter to any possible move by the Soviet Union into the Mediterranean basin. In the 1960s, Spain registered an unprecedented rate of economic growth which was propelled by industrialisation, a mass internal migration from rural areas to Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque Country and the creation of a mass tourism industry. - Wikipedia

The Spanish civil war was over before WW2 started, and WW2 finished long before this story got started, so Malpica's injury might not have come from a military battle, except he got hit by an 'exploding shell', which sounds military. Of course he is in the heroin business, so he could have had a run-in with the coasties (or whatever the Spanish equivalent of the Coast Guard is), or it could have been trouble with a rival gang who managed to get hold of biggish gun. Franco was running things and being the defacto king, he wasn't going to put up with any guff, especially from an entitled heroin smuggler. So I could see Malpica feeling his oats in his younger days and getting smacked down. Lucky he survived. Franco was in charge until his death in 1975.

Most of Malpica's gang don't use heroin. His lawyer asks one of the people who does use it what it is like. That was a bright spot in the dialog. He doesn't know because he's never used it. Huh. Malpica considers addicts unreliable. Anna, the wife of the US consul, plays a key role in getting the drugs through Barcelona, possibly by giving her doting husband documents to sign, assuring him that is 'nothing important, it just needs your signature darling'. I just made that up, I'm not sure they give us that much of an explanation. Anyway, she's an addict and a complete flake.

It's nice when the lead character in a story has a clear line that they follow, perhaps because then you can predict how they are going to react to any given situation, and when something happens and they react as you think they should, you are rewarded with a little bubble of happiness. That doesn't happen in this show. Hache is always going off at a tangent, most of which seem like a bad idea, but they mostly seem to turn out, well, if not good, at least not too bad, and some of them turn out great, which might be part of the reason Malpica is so attracted to her. Beauty, brains and chutzpah.

In Spanish with subtitles. The preview doesn't have subtitles, but it still gives you a pretty good feel for the show.

P.S. Variety has a story about the show.