The series about the art of seducing men and leaving them bald

In 2008, long before MeToo and the boom of women in television comedy, Malena Pichot launched a video blog on YouTube, The crazy shit, which revolutionized online humor with stand-up comedy that addressed everything from the embarrassment of calling your ex to pre-period moods. The format opened the door to conquering a territory as masculinized as audiovisual comedy from a feminine and feminist perspective, and became a reference for many subsequent podcasters, such as those responsible for the popular Weekly Deformed. Pichot has maintained her popularity on social media (she has over a million followers on X), to the point of becoming a widely recognized media figure in Argentina, who delves into political and feminist issues without being intimidated by hateful reactions.

The latest wave of hostility she has suffered has made her partly "responsible" for the brutal murder of three girls by a group of drug traffickers, a crime that has shocked Argentina. The "blame" is said to come from her latest series, Black lives: whores and slobs, a class comedy about two women in their forties who, when they were young, had worked as black widows. That is, they were girls who seduced men to gain their trust and then drugged them and left them bald. But the accidental death of one of their victims, the famous owner of a series of Buenos Aires nightclubs, forces the two to abandon these practices and embark on different paths. Maru (Pilar Gamboa) changes her life and settles with her family in one of those gated communities for rich people "who don't know what taxes are." Mica (Pichot) sets up a hair salon in her lifelong neighborhood, where she lives with her university-aged twin sons. But when an old acquaintance is released from prison, they are forced to reunite and resume their old trade. Will they feel up to it?

Far from glamorizing this practice, Black widows takes it as a starting point to propose a female crime comedy. The series distances itself from the thrillers Tarantino-esque genres with women as protagonists, while also exploring credible terrain to cultivate a feminine variant of so many films and series about underprivileged kids who operate outside the law. Pichot doesn't condemn her protagonists, but neither does she make the mistake of legitimizing, through feminism, their past as black widows. The setting serves her well to develop an unpretentious but highly successful series about older women. At the same time, she takes a shot at the imbecilic elitism of the neighborhoods. Cheetos, celebrates the friendship between the protagonists and points out how problematic dependent loves are.

Black widows proves that Malena Pichot remains a name to be reckoned with in contemporary comedy, even in the more conventional format of a fiction series. As an actress, she is more convincing than ever. At her side, Pilar Gamboa, a member of Piel de Lava (one of Argentina's best theater companies), is responsible for complementing Pichot's more popular and comedic register with an intense and dramatic performance, in the role of the protagonist who seeks to escape her past of poverty and crime in a gated community, where she befriends three rich women. Because Black widows It ends up being above all a comedy of vindication of the popular environments in an increasingly classist country.