On Monday night, 8 things to do before you die It opened TV3's season of premieres. We hope the broadcast doesn't set the tone for the rest of the new shows, because Joan Pera's dreams ended up being a nightmare. The idea is simple: the veteran actor pretends to fulfill his pending aspirations. And this leads him to experiences that are supposedly daring for a man of his age and prudence. A comedy is made in which Pera pretends he wants to be a shepherd or a television reporter, and TV3 helps him make this dream a reality. If the first program was the best of the series, it's tragic to imagine what the next ones will be like. It began with Joan Pera dressed as a shepherd visiting the goat farm of Peyu, another television protagonist who in recent months has even been found in our soup. 8 things to do before you die It reiterates this endogamous inertia that feeds on the channel's regular characters, in an evident lack of imagination and resources that is worrying.
Joan Pera plays this alter ego his ego so characteristic, possessed by Woody Allen's cinematic flair, fearful and overwhelmed, often overwhelmed by circumstances. But the protagonist's theatrics end up feeling forced and tiresome. Because beyond that, there's nothing. More than in Joan Pera, we see the caricature of Joan Pera to trigger the show's plot game. And it even tastes bad, because it's a kind of gratuitous exploitation of his own parody that ends up causing fatigue.
The situations presented are useless. When it comes to playing the shepherd or the reporter, there's no conflict or tension, so they have to force the story through editing. The situation of herding the alpacas was clumsily reduced to the host's viral histrionic laughter. The editing, with sound effects and freezing small moments, isn't even funny, because rather than exaggerating reality, what it does is manipulate it to make it seem like things are happening. But the truth is, throughout the program, absolutely nothing happened.
And for the umpteenth time on a TV3 entertainment program, the problem is the abuse of the blessed. 8 things to do before you die It could have been a good idea if it had been worked with a more sincere purpose. But it's reduced to a slapstick act that only exploits the actor, who is limited to a single register. It also plays with a clearly ageist factor: the humor is intended to be constructed from the stereotype of an older person for whom changing environment and activity in a very basic way causes excessive stress (exaggerated by the protagonist himself). The proof is that if the program had chosen someone in their fifties to do exactly the same thing, the idea would have been deactivated. The program failed to construct a story beyond exploiting a caricature. Narratively, it uses the distress and confusion of an older person to try to make the viewer laugh. And when the starting point is this, it's more pitiful than funny.
