Summary
An hour-long accompaniment to the latest season of Money Heist explains how a Spanish crime-drama became an award-winning global mega-hit.
Today, the fourth season of the indescribably popular Spanish crime-drama Money Heist debuts on Netflix, and it’s accompanied by an hour-long documentary feature, Money Heist: The Phenomenon, which looks to explain how the show went from a planned two-part limited series to the streaming giant’s most popular international hit.
The show, about a group of thieves and their professor taking a five-finger discount from both the Royal Mint and Bank of Spain, has had an interesting enough trajectory to make a documentary like this worthwhile. Álex Pina’s show, which first broadcast on Spanish network Antena 3, was a terrestrial flop; Netflix picked it up, re-edited it slightly and got international eyeballs on it, including those of celebrity endorsers from behind iconic Salvador Dalí masks. That and an International Emmy Award were enough to garner the show enough attention for a follow-up, which Money Heist: The Phenomenon reveals was met with a ridiculous amount of public attention.
The fruits of that production, blessed by an unprecedented level of access and fervor but also blighted by the chaos of its own popularity, become available today at the exact same time as this behind-the-scenes look at the creative process; a bizarre, compelling one-two punch of streaming content that could only really exist in our exalted age of on-demand entertainment. Now there’s a phenomenon for you.
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