It has been some time since I’ve experienced the kind of TV pleasures afforded by the new Spanish series The New Years, which debuted on Mubi this month. These pleasures are of the slow-release variety—that several-hours-in recognition that a series you’re watching has hit its stride, and could well be one of the best things you’ve watched all year. TV used to work this way. Series were allowed to ripen, develop audiences, find their footing: famously The Office softened up many episodes in, while Mad Men went the other way, going from jazzy period diversion to existentially profound character study.
Mind you, neither comes particularly to mind watching the 10 episodes of The New Years—nor does much of anything else on American television. This is the brainchild of the Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen (whose acclaimed 2022 drama The Beasts is another must-watch on Mubi) and the writers Sara Cano and Paula Fabra—and the best comparison for what they’ve created would be the talky lovelorn masterpieces of Éric Rohmer, or Richard Linklater’s latter-day homages, those glorious Before movies. Over nearly eight hours (each episode is between 35 and 55 minutes long) Sorogoyen and his writers document a single love story, between two young Madrileños, Ana and Óscar, as it moves through time.
The New Years is streaming on Mubi, where episodes will be released weekly through January.
There’s a structural gimmick, too—one that takes a little getting used to, but ultimately makes The New Years light on its feet. Each episode takes place only on December 31, in a successive year, so that the series runs from 2014 to 2024. In the opening episode, Ana, played with restless yearning by Iria del Río, is a bartender turning 30 (her birthday is on December 31) and ambivalent about getting her professional shit together. Partying after hours, she meets a young medical student, Óscar (Francesco Carril, all quiet vulnerability and mulish strength) and they have the kind of besotted, alcohol-fueled hookup (shot with unashamed bluntness, as are all the sex scenes) that can amount to something or nothing.
It amounts to something. Ana and Óscar fall in love, but not in the way it is often depicted, and their connection, deep as it is, never quite syncs. There’s life’s push and pull: Ana wants adventure, Óscar wants stability; what they expect from the other is the opposite of what they get. The New Years moves at a sometimes stately pace (and travels from Madrid to Berlin and Lyon) but sticking with it yields serious rewards. Several mid-series plot developments took my breath away, and I gradually began watching each episode with the kind of rapt attention I typically pay to shows I’ve been committed to for several seasons running. The experience is fine-grained and novelistic: what The New Years may lack in incident it makes up for in conversation and subtle psychological reveals, of our protagonists and their circle of family and acquaintances. Over time, these two complicated adults seemed as real to me as friends. Ana is helpless to her appetites (and, in fact, becomes a chef); Óscar is gentle and kind—a good doctor—but also distrustful and wounded by events in his past.
I won’t give away the end, but when you get there (and Mubi is rolling out the episodes weekly through the month of January) the question of whether Ana and Óscar can find their way to each other once and for all may seem as important as anything you’ve seen this year.
