One of the most comical situations this week has been the meeting of two presenters who are the paradigm of manipulation and entanglement: Pablo Motos invited Sonsoles Ónega to present her new book on El hormiguero. During the conversation, Motos asked her about the VAT on books and she complained that it was 21%, considering that if it were lower she would sell more books and people would read more. Both presenters criticized that the VAT on books was the same as that on cigarette packs. “The VAT on books should not exist if you want a cultured country”, said Motos, and they hinted at the possibility of campaigning for the government to reduce it, pointing to Pedro Sánchez as responsible. “What happens is that the president of the government is in China, but well, he will get there eventually...”, said the ant tamer.Neither Motos nor Ónega knew that, in reality, the VAT on books is 4%, and the next day both had to correct themselves on their programs. Motos corrected himself hastily, blaming the guest: “Sonsoles Ónega proposed to the team that we talk about the VAT on books. We said yes and nobody checked the data”. That this slip-up with the VAT on books happened in the context of Atresmedia is very significant, considering that the group has Grupo Planeta as its main shareholder, one of the major players in the publishing industry. It must have caused internal tensions that, within the same business ecosystem, such a basic error about the sector has been spread. It highlights the lack of knowledge of the cultural industry within the same conglomerate. Ónega, affected, was undergoing therapy with psychologist Rafael Santandreu, taking advantage of having him as a guest: “I beat myself up. I’ve been anxious all day, Dr. Santandreu, for not having confirmed the data. I apologize. I did it without any intention of misinforming or manipulating”, she assured. And she asked the “doc” for advice on how to overcome the ordeal. Santandreu consoled her with the argument that he had sold more than a million books and also did not know the percentage of the tax. He reassured her with his usual fallacies: that to not worry, he only had to want to do so and that one mistake cannot overshadow all the good you can do. Using his simplistic explanations, he appealed to the “virus of terribilitis” as a mechanism to overstate concerns. Ónega thanked him for the good advice and moved on to more consultations for the “doc”.The chain of blunders is fascinating. They are wrong about the VAT on books in a company mostly owned by one of the major publishing groups. Ónega, to get over the upset, was having therapy, calling "doctor" a guest who is neither a doctor nor has a doctorate in anything. And the psychologist, instead of denying it, legitimized his authority by appealing to the sale of more than a million books. Luckily, the presenters called for "a more cultured country."

Channel 33 has premiered Sala 30, a cultural program commemorating the Macba's 30th anniversary. To celebrate, the series approaches the anniversary through reflection rather than festivity or protest. These are eight forty-minute episodes that delve into different working axes of creative processes: form and substance, struggle, concept, enigma, gaze, space, body, and research. Each program invites four or five relevant artists who have passed through the museum to engage in a dialogue about these themes in a rural and bucolic setting that contrasts with the geometric and urban whiteness of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona building: a farmhouse and a set table with the elegant informality of a heartwarming fuet advertisement. The visual execution, from direction to editing and post-production, is beautiful and surprisingly quaint. It could be a podcast if it weren't for the need to see the guests' work to understand their proposals and their point of view in the conversation. Sala 30 connects with the aesthetic spirit of that old splendor of Channel 33, when it still seemed like a cohesive channel with a well-defined editorial line. The presenter is the singer and actor Albert Pla in his most accommodating and predisposed version. Surely, it is also his most strenuous and unusual facet because it is he who has to stimulate the debate among the guests. Pla has no choice but to flee from his more diffuse and anarchic media persona to energize the conversation, often fighting against his own shyness. The choice of presenter seems to obey a desire not to over-intellectualize the format and to give it a more relaxed and popular touch. "I'm the one with the least studies at this table," he comments with a sense of humor in the first chapter. The program always begins with a dialogue between Pla and one of the artists to introduce the chapter's theme. Afterwards, with the food ready and the table set, the rest of the guests arrive. It's interesting to see how they break the ice among themselves, in most cases, one of the most difficult moments for the presenter, to the point that in some episodes he asks them if the act of meeting and dialoguing overwhelms them or feels burdensome. The effectiveness of the format is irregular depending on the chemistry that arises between the guests and the ability to find a flowing thread. For those interested in art and culture, it is a magnificent opportunity to discover contemporary artists, understand generational evolutions and learn about forms of creation and research. Beyond the central theme, Sala 30 allows us to glimpse ways of life, creative processes and disciplines. Manolo Laguillo, Pilar Aymerich, Joan Fontcuberta, Frederic Amat, Núria Güell, Lúa Coderch, Laia Abril and a long etcetera parade around the set table of the farmhouse. Almost forty artists in a television proposal that seems too conventional, conservative and cautious for a program about Macba and contemporary art, which usually questions languages, experiments with codes and avoids neutrality.

A little over a year ago, when Ricard Ustrell interviewed Susanna Griso on Col·lapse, the Antena 3 journalist lamented that her private life appeared in certain media because she had always tried to preserve her family's privacy. She also explained the discomfort of having to live with paparazzi cars that followed her wherever she went, even at the time of going to do that interview.It is curious, however, how Susanna Griso, when working, applies a different criterion. This Tuesday, on her program, she echoed the complaint of the ex-wife of cyclist Óscar Freire for sexist violence. Espejo público reported that the judge had issued a restraining order against the cyclist after his ex-partner had reported him for installing surveillance cameras at her home and car, tracking the vehicle with GPS, and cloning her WhatsApp. A reporter traveled to the town where the protagonists lived and toured the town, recounting the places where a series of public arguments had occurred. Along the way, he was asking the neighbors what they knew about the abuse: “Today they arrest anyone. Maybe tomorrow they will arrest me for talking”, said one lady. “Unfortunately, this issue of abuse is misused by some women”, said another, casting doubt on the victim. The reporter was probing the interviewees: “The family is also well-known...”, he suggested to a woman, in case she revealed any details. As the interviewee answered yes, the reporter gossiped: “The mother must be good then, right?”, he said, as if he were interested in the affected family. “Imagine! Like any mother!”, replied the neighbor. Then, the reporter went to the victim's house and rang the intercom asking for her: “Is Laura there? It's to know a little how she is after what happened...”. Logically, they hung up.Susanna Griso was covering the chronicle and they moved on to interview a detective. A collaborator on the program asked her a terrifying question: “Can we consider situations of controlling people to be normalized?” After the detective clarified that surveillance had to comply with the law, they had a bit of a chat about the case. Another collaborator explained that there were witnesses who had seen the cyclist take his ex-wife's phone, throw it, or not let her make phone calls. When a panelist emphasized the severity of sexist violence as a structural problem, Griso quickly closed the topic: “Intolerable. It's good that we're reporting it, because you don't have to suffer a similar situation if that's your case,” she advised the audience. What victims shouldn't have to suffer is the media's pursuit to their doorstep and them calling the intercom. Nor should reporters ask neighbors to re-victimize them and be nosy. What you defend for yourself, you should want for others.

Sunday night, 30 minuts condensed the Rodalies drama, both from a historical perspective and from the analysis of the current situation. That the chronology of Renfe's poor service dated back to 1988 was an act of justice to all the users who suffered Renfe's serious deficiencies in silence and with resignation at that time. In fact, the report played with jumps to the past and showed how, since then, everything has gone from bad to worse. The images from 1988 and 2026 by Josep Maria Romeu, the spokesperson for the first Renfe users' platform, demonstrated this. An excellent resource. The archive images from TV3 became a damning proof of the grievances that Catalans have suffered with the precariousness of the service. News of accidents, misfortunes, fires, and breakdowns were accumulating and happening one after another, turning it into a very revealing film of events. In fact, you realized to what extent technological progress available to citizens has been what has allowed the countless deficiencies of Renfe to be denounced. Social networks and mobile phone cameras have allowed users to organize among themselves and publicly denounce the accumulation of blunders they have to endure every day. The testimonies were very well chosen. The exercise of following the journey of a few regular users was also very revealing, because any follow-up trip was a collection of incidents that reflected the chaos. The sequence of the passenger waiting for the alternative bus in Sant Cugat, being scolded by the driver and people recklessly crossing the roundabout, is excellent for confirming the poor organization and how user safety is put at risk.The report Renfe, the endless story reveals that Renfe has had no choice but to accept a forced exercise in transparency. The images from the Renfe control center at Clot station, from where operations are managed, were very revealing. One could call it a center of disarray, with the chaos of stressed workers interfering with each other. That panorama could inspire a sitcom, a workplace comedy. In fact, 30 minuts itself distilled an internal thread of a certain sarcasm. A bitter humor like that developed by passengers trapped by the incompetence of Adif and Renfe, this two-headed monster that cannot even agree with itself, as was also clear. The appearance of the singer Gerard Quintana in the middle of it all was the tragicomic echo of how the train ends up determining our lives.More than discovering anything to us, the 30 minutes served to immortalize an unforgivable mistreatment of the citizen, as documentary proof for the future. It will be necessary to see if in future generations these images will seem unthinkable to them or if they will only be the next victims of a new chapter in this endless story.

During the launch of Artemis II in NASA's lunar mission, CNN interviewed William Shatner, the actor who played Captain Kirk in the series Star Trek. Shatner didn't just navigate the Universe in fiction. In 2021, at ninety years old, he traveled to space with Blue Origin. When asked about the experience of seeing Earth from so far away, he confessed that he felt immense sadness. In his memoirs, he explained that he couldn't stop crying: “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration and, instead, it was a funeral. It was one of the most intense sensations I have ever experienced. The contrast between the ruthless coldness of space and the protective warmth of Earth, down there, filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day we learn of new destructions of Earth caused by ourselves: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna... things that have taken five billion years to evolve and which, suddenly, we will never see again due to human interference. It filled me with dread”.

The splashdown of the Orion capsule early Saturday morning, marking the end of the Artemis II mission, was extraordinarily spectacular and suspenseful. In the most dangerous stage of the mission, other elements come into play, such as the beauty of the images, the violence of the contact with the atmosphere, and the eventual loss of connection with the crew.

This Thursday, the protagonists of the program La revuelta were served humor on a silver platter. They had received the resolution from the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) regarding a complaint filed by UTECA, the Union of Open Commercial Television. The conflict has a strictly regulatory origin: RTVE cannot broadcast conventional advertising and can only incorporate advertisements in the form of sponsorships in programs of cultural or sporting content. The complaint started from the premise that La revuelta violated this legal framework. The CNMC contradicted this with a bewildering wording that justified the broadcast as cultural. “The program is presented by its director in a humorous key and has great dynamism”. And it added that Broncano appeared on stage “with great energy and liveliness”. The text of the resolution was so delirious that the presenter himself and collaborator Jorge Ponce made fun of the argumentative twists, for example when describing the content: “Capybaras were discussed, 'walking football' or Angelman syndrome and the actor Salva Reina and the Spanish rugby team were interviewed”. All in all, the regulatory body considered that, despite being an entertainment space, the format was not incompatible with the cultural dimension and, therefore, the sponsorship did not contravene the regulations.

Thursday at noon, Helena Garcia Melero brought an expert to the Tot es mou table to assess the global economic and geopolitical situation. Right at the start, the presenter activated the emotional framework, attributing to the CSIC researcher, Antonio Turiel, an anxiety visible even before he began to speak: “I greeted you a moment ago and nothing... with a look your worry was evident...”. More than presenting the specialist, she dragged the audience into a state of mind.During his analysis, the scientist, with a very pessimistic tone, recalled the kerosene supply problems and made a prediction: “What comes next is diesel. Then in Europe there will be a diesel supply problem”. The presenter deduced that this would imply traffic rotations according to license plates or teleworking recommendation. Turiel stated emphatically: “This is inevitable. This will happen”. Immediately, a caption on the screen turned it into news: The CSIC researcher's knowledge is surely solid. But working with hypotheses, data, description of trends and scenario planning is one thing, and a very different one is offering absolute truths, announcing inevitable catastrophes and turning personal opinions into prophecies. Because then we turn scientific authority into a kind of oracle. Turiel warned of Europe's problems with electrical stability and drug supply, and announced future wars for resources. Melero asked him: "There's talk of an electroshock... How should we understand that?". And here came the great disaster: "We are heading towards an unprecedented economic crisis. I get angry talking about an economic crisis because they are killing people, eh... [...] and we will kill many more people because one thing that is stalled is fertilizers". And the outlook became even more dramatic: "All the problem with fertilizers guarantees very bad harvests this year. Furthermore, it is a year that could be very hot and, therefore, will complicate everything even more. And then we will be talking about millions of deaths. And I think that is the most worrying thing of all". Melero, startled, agreed with him: "Of course!, of course!". Turiel might be right and everything he says could happen. It's not about doubting him, but about questioning the way he expresses it. He adds an emotional state to the analysis, incorporates opinions about what will happen as irrefutable truths, and uses an assertive deterministic tone ("This is inevitable", "This will happen", "There will be millions of deaths") that, rather than posing hypotheses, announces a fatal and inexorable destiny. He turns all plausible scenarios into a chain of successive misfortunes without room for error. And Melero reinforced the alarmism. Watching "Everything is Moving" it seemed that the enormous complexity of the world was reduced to a simple television prophecy more suited to fortune-tellers than to scientists.

The 11 of Raval, which TV3 premiered on Tuesday on Nits sense ficció, awoke many expectations. A well-defined and ambitious investigation into the dismantling, in 2008, of a jihadist cell that intended to attack the Barcelona metro. The documentary delves into the role of an informant, known as F1, who became a protected witness. You can find it again on the 3Cat platform, in the format of a four-episode series. However, linking them to be broadcast as a single documentary had consequences for the effectiveness of the narrative, with repetitions and lengthy narrative arcs.Despite everything, journalistic work is very interesting. It demonstrates irregularities in both the investigation and the trial, has access to very relevant primary sources, recognizes the work of the two journalists who identify the protected witness, and constructs its own perspective on the events and the vital outcome for the detainees. Formally, the graphic design of the names and positions becomes excessively cloying: the visual preponderance of the labels ends up being bothersome due to simple repetition. However, the structure and ordering of the facts are impeccable and allow for a very good understanding of the dynamics and irregularities of a complex trial, especially thanks to the explanatory capacity of the defense lawyer Benet Salellas.The documentary has a very subtle, but relevant, aspect: the editing observes with special attention the gestures and microexpressions of the protagonists, especially when their interventions highlight the most dubious aspects of the case. For example, when Javier Gómez Bermúdez, then president of the criminal chamber of the National High Court, has to admit some negligences in the process, the camera focuses on his subsequent silence and the discomfort becomes visible on his face. Also the attitude of the lawyer of the Association of Victims of Terrorism, José María Fuster-Fabra, lighting his cigar and showing off in front of the camera. They are details that communicate beyond the facts.The most fragile aspect of the documentary is its excess of ambiguity when providing concrete answers. This is already evident at the beginning, when the then director of the CNI, Alberto Saiz, explains that in the 11-M attacks, “the CNI’s information did reach the police, but the police did not act, for whatever reasons””. Perhaps it would have been interesting to clarify them. Also when one of the expert journalists on the case leaves suspended the reasons for the protected witness’s conduct: “You can draw a hypothesis as to why he did what he did””, without being more explicit. The documentary falls short in clearly defining the whys: why Asim Iqbal, F1, acts as he acts. But also why Gómez Bermúdez tolerates an investigation and a trial with so many irregularities. Beyond implying an abuse in the preventive fight against terrorism, motives are lacking. You have the feeling that in the answers we would find arguments related to dark political and judicial points that are still relevant.

Monday morning, as the trial for the Kitchen case was starting, journalists gathered in front of the National Court were harassing some of the defendants. The only one who played along was Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, who, with his characteristic cap and sunglasses, was eager to stir up the media pot. The character is responsible for tensing the atmosphere because he always performs better in tense situations. Amidst the swarm of microphones, a journalist from Mañaneros 360 asked him a question and specified it was for Javier Ruiz's program on Televisión Española. The presenter's name provoked an immediate reaction from the commissioner: “Ah! Don Javierito!”, he exclaimed sarcastically. “Tell Don Javierito that the PP did not hire me, as he says. That is a lie. Besides, Javierito, we were such good friends in the past... It's unbelievable!” Javier Ruiz, alarmed, interrupted the broadcast and, although Villarejo could not hear him, wanted to clarify the blunder: “No! No! No! No, commissioner! We are not going to have a live dialogue, but good friends you and I... We don't even know each other! Never in my life! You are friends with other presenters! You are mistaken! You tried to contact me, you did it by mobile phone when we reported on you. And we haven't had a single coffee. We've never met in our lives!”Villarejo, as if he had been warned of the response, insisted: “If you say we don't know each other... What a bad memory you have, Javierito, huh! You were worried because I was competing with Ferreras at the same time!” He implied that, in the past, Ruiz would have been upset by the commissioner's closeness to Antonio García Ferreras of La Sexta, and he, who then had the program on Cuatro, also wanted his exclusives. Javier Ruiz, uneasy, denied it again. “Absolutely false! You are lying, Villarejo! We have never had this conversation! You are a liar!” He insisted that everyone knew which journalist he worked for: “We are aware of who he passed information to and who bought it without checking it, no matter how crude it was”. One person's word against the other's and the mystery for the audience. Villarejo is capable of dynamiting any context. It was impossible to clarify who was telling the truth, but it is worth analyzing the commissioner's strategy. He deviated from journalism to personal confrontation. Since he did not have control of the informational situation, he took over the television frame. He provoked the journalist by publicly discrediting him. Villarejo is aware that implying complicity makes the journalist lose credibility. The commissioner himself brought up Ferreras's name in the discussion because that way he could put the entire media structure under suspicion. He exposed the sewers of journalism to survive himself.

The start of the trial in the Kitchen case has led right-leaning programs to seek narrative and visual strategies to minimize the impact on the PP. The most ingenious maneuver was that of Antena 3 Noticias. When opening the news program, they opted for a dispersal narrative: announcing the spring judicial calendar. First, they referred to the Kitchen case, but then they recalled all the cases affecting the socialist party: the mask case, which will begin to be judged this Tuesday; that of Pedro Sánchez's brother, which will start on May 28, and they also added the cases of PSOE financing, of Leire Díez, and of Santos Cerdán, which do not yet have a trial date. They thus made evident the imbalance of the scales between the PP and the PSOE. They projected the calendar on the news screen, and among the faces of the accused, the PSOE logo stood out in red. The PP's was nowhere to be seen. Sandra Golpe announced: "Intense judicial calendar that will reactivate the clash between PP and PSOE". Later, she insisted: "This judicial spring is coming very intensely!".When focusing on the Kitchen case, a visual strategy that had already been repeated throughout the morning became evident. To explain the case, they used archive images that focused, above all, on Luis Bárcenas and, a little less, on José Manuel Villarejo. At Espejo Público and El programa de Ana Rosa —with Quintana on vacation—, they did the same. Bárcenas' images were repeatedly shown in a loop in different contexts: leaving prison, testifying in a trial, sitting on the defendant's bench, entering the courts, or walking down the street with his son or his lawyer. Therefore, Bárcenas did not seem like the popular prosecution but the main defendant. Secondly, Villarejo's figure was the most used. In a more fleeting and sporadic way, Jorge Fernández Díaz, Francisco Martínez, and Eugenio Pino were shown, but in most cases, they were more general shots that did not personalize the involvement as much. On Espejo público, the face that occupied the large screen behind Susanna Griso's desk was Bárcenas'. On Informativos Telecinco, the graphic layouts on the screen continued to point to Bárcenas as guilty. "The PP's kitchen against Bárcenas", they titled in huge letters. And below, they put an image of the treasurer and another of Mariano Rajoy. But with a singularity: on Bárcenas' photograph, they put a label in capital letters: CONVICTED. The explanation of the facts was correct and rigorous, but the entire visual construction continued to point to the treasurer. A structural scandal affecting a party's apparatus and the sewers of the State now has a visual narrative that diverts attention and visually centers everything on two figures: Bárcenas and Villarejo. The choice is not innocent. This personification does not correspond to the magnitude of the facts being judged and serves to reduce the reputational impact of Rajoy's government's top brass.

The Easter break has multiplied photographs on social networks. The extra days of rest and the leisure activities that result from them cause an avalanche of postcards showcasing well-being to attest to their transformative power. Since a smile is a way to demonstrate this, experts have appeared on social networks offering advice on managing facial expressions to ensure their success. One should avoid the half-hearted smile of obligation or the strained grimace in order to be convincing or achieve a certain photogenicity. Shouting "Lluís!" while prolonging the "i", switching to English to say "cheese", or syllabifying "pa-ta-ta" is no longer in vogue.Now, the new trend is to explain the Duchenne smile theory almost as an infallible solution for communicating a true feeling of happiness. The Duchenne smile is the result of the activation of two facial muscles that supposedly cause a sincere and heartfelt laugh. The name comes from the neurologist who investigated this correlation between facial expressions and the association with the emotions that result from them. In the 19th century, Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne was obsessed with understanding the mechanisms of the face for expressing emotions. He applied electrical shocks to the facial muscles of his patients to stimulate them in a very specific way, to see what grimaces appeared and what emotions they seemed to correspond to. The result was recorded in a terribly disturbing book: Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine

NASA's lunar mission with the launch of Artemis II has led some news outlets to bring back, in one way or another, that conspiracy theory which claims that the arrival of humans on the Moon in 1969 was a deception.

There are images that have a symbolic weight that endures over time. It was inevitable to think about them during the launch of Artemis II, especially from the CNN broadcast. A little over forty years ago, in January 1986, the American news channel was only six years old and the 24-hour continuous information model still raised doubts. The explosion of the Challenger shuttle just 73 seconds after launch was explained live and overturned the journalistic narrative they had planned. The tragedy – with the death of the seven crew members – happened in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers, and with the bewilderment and doubts of the reporters themselves.

For weeks now, both Antena 3 and La Sexta have been abruptly inserting advertising breaks that disrupt television content. These are not the usual ad breaks, where presenters hand over to commercials. Nor are they interruptions with a notice of a divider separating two blocks of a program. Nor the classic transition between two different broadcasts. It is a twenty-second advertisement that violently intrudes upon whatever event is being broadcast at that moment, crushing its content. Last week, amidst the tense and sensationalist news about Noelia Castillo's euthanasia request during the broadcast of Y ahora Sonsoles and Más vale tarde, there were several interruptions of this nature. If a report was being aired, a panel discussion was taking place, or a live connection was being made, those twenty seconds of advertising trampled over the live feed. This Wednesday, on Espejo público, Lorena García was interviewing Iñaki Anasagasti in a live connection. She was asking him about the photographs of ETA prisoners that had appeared in a popular race and, to conclude the conversation, she took the opportunity to ask him what he thought of the lehendakari's request to bring the Guernica to the Guggenheim in Bilbao for a few months as a form of symbolic reparation. Just at that moment, a loud twenty-second advertisement suddenly appeared, drowning out his words. When the violent and annoying advertising cut ended, Anasagasti was already finishing his sentence. We were left without his response. These are advertising inserts that are made outside the program's broadcast signal. They inject them directly into DTT. If you retrieve the broadcast on Atresmedia's digital platform or through Movistar+'s grid, that advertising cut does not appear. It is only for viewers watching DTT. Obviously, these inserts do not save you from the usual advertising. The formula could violate the general audiovisual communication law of 2022 because it does not respect the program's integrity – advertising cannot cut off responses, sentences, scenes, or any narrative continuity–. Furthermore, this practice could be used as a form of veiled censorship, disrupting television moments at convenience. The method is part of an increasingly widespread trend of disregard for viewers. It is a way of transforming the model: the audience ceases to be the recipient of the content and becomes a mere reception device for advertising impacts. The television experience is increasingly fragmented and poorly curated. Given the ease with which certain commercial practices are adopted, the method could end up invading television grids. From all for the audience to all for the money.

This Monday, Crims delved into the case of a woman's murder in Parets del Vallès. The episode was titled Betrayal, but it was something more serious. Carles Porta presented it as a mystery: “The Mossos immediately suspect the perpetrator is her husband, but Jennifer's family don't believe it because to them he is like another son. Are the Mossos wrong? Or are the family members wrong?”. It is unimaginable that Crims would treat a case as an error by the Mossos because praising their work is an essential part of the series. Their material and testimonies are indispensable for the program. It was a case of male violence, but as has happened before in Crims, Porta did not verbalize it. It was implicit. In the entire narrative, gender violence was only pronounced once, because the killer himself wrote it in a letter to feign his innocence and the text was read.

This year, TV3's program Signes dels temps celebrates forty years on air. It airs on Sunday mornings and delves into the social and pastoral current affairs of the Catholic Church. The title refers to an expression from the Second Vatican Council about the Church's duty to be attentive to the changes and evolutions of society. Perhaps it would be good for TV3 to also be attentive to the evolution of its schedule, because, ironically, this slot has been somewhat neglected. It must be said that Signes dels temps is formally correct with Montserrat Esteve at the helm. There is a certain effort to give it a veneer of connection with social reality. The content aligns with the program's objective, and it is made with care and professionalism. The post-production work should be highlighted to give it a relative visual modernity. It will surely satisfy the expectations of the Episcopal Conference, but this centrality of Catholicism and an approach with such a typical catechism style do not quite align with the function of a public television.

In 2001, Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, began to notice the emotional burden of decades of research into depression and mental illness. He felt that the professional approach based on trying to cure trauma was imbuing him with a certain sadness. This led him to reflect on psychological therapies, often so focused on repairing harm that they forget to inject us with a good dose of optimism that makes us face life with more enthusiasm and joy. Seligman had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association and paved the way in a new direction: the so-called positive psychology. He wanted to study, scientifically, what the mechanisms are that make us feel that life is worth living. He did not intend to build any abstract theory but to establish effective behaviors that could be tested and measured. In 2005, Seligman and his research team recruited four hundred and eleven volunteers and divided them into five groups. One group would make a list of positive memories, another would identify their personal strengths. A third group would introduce small specified changes in their daily lives and a fourth would limit themselves to describing childhood memories. The fifth group would undertake a more elaborate task: they would write a letter of gratitude to someone important in their life, someone to whom they had not properly thanked. Afterwards, they would call them by phone, arrange to meet without explaining the reason, and once they had the person in front of them, they would read the letter aloud. It could not be a card with a meager “thanks for everything” to get it over with. The letter had to be about three hundred words long and specify the reasons for the gratitude, the details of that event, and how that person's gesture had changed their life. They named this exercise the gratitude visit.

The Madison is a series that seems to have premiered for Easter with the purpose of redeeming us, especially women living in urban areas. Starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell, it has a plot that the SkyShowtime menu already explains more than enough. It is created by Taylor Sheridan, the architect of the contemporary western. But if you like series about rich people, luxurious settings, and extraordinary landscapes, The Madison will not disappoint you. A woman from New York will be forced to rebuild her life far from her world. The title of the series already determines the importance that the landscape will have in all of this. It takes its name from the most emblematic river in Montana, which crosses areas near Yellowstone National Park. Nature and territory will be so decisive that they will become moralizing devices for the protagonists. The river environment will become a kind of silent arbiter as an activator of family drama.  

If this Easter you don't have the opportunity to travel, you can do so through the CaixaForum+ platform. It is free, you just need to register, and it is full of cultural content that will offer you an alternative to exhibitions, museums, concerts or operas. Documentaries that will transport you to the world of multiple artists and writers, their lives and their works.One of the options is Renoir in love, a documentary that takes you on a journey through the paintings of the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The production is linked to the exhibition that has just opened at the Musée d'Orsay: Renoir and Love. Happy Modernity (1865-1885). Part of the narrative is constructed from the biography written by his son, filmmaker Jean Renoir, after a period during which they were able to share conversations. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was known as the painter of happiness, the man who painted for fun. He reinvented the art of his time when the world was undergoing great transformation. Life was accelerating, with a great desire to enjoy the present. The Impressionists exalted the culture of leisure, with people outdoors doing simple things: la joie de vivre.The documentary uses archival images of Paris from the late 19th century which are related to his paintings. A way to discover the utopia of the world the artist dreamed of. Experts provide the context. They explain how history, society, friendships, and family will influence the scenes, the light in the paintings, the brushstrokes, and the colors.Renoir's paintings help explain how couple relationships and the concept of seduction are changing in 19th-century society. We also discover how the painter disguised certain realities that emerged through a more refined gaze. The painting "The Loggia" hides details of a couple who perhaps were not as happy as they might have seemed at first glance. The gender perspective analysis of the female figures, which were so often the central theme of his works, is very interesting. Renoir went from being considered a feminist to a misogynist, and the documentary takes a cross-sectional look at his paintings to explain the reasons for this evolution. The narration strives for us to distance ourselves from the clichés associated with the painter and to try to understand him from the perspective of the era, re-signifying the concepts of love, romanticism, crowds, and leisure.“An artwork must grab you, completely envelop you, transport you”, said Pierre-August Renoir. And this documentary, Renoir in love, helps make that a reality, revealing how his personal life transformed his work and how he projected himself into his paintings. It is a privileged guided tour of the artist's exhibition at the d’Orsay museum, but without the need to travel to Paris.