BIG MONEY

How Money Heist— a small Spanish TV drama— suddenly became one of the most devoured shows in Netflix history and a worldwide phenomenon.

- GABRIELLA PAIELLA

Every worldwide phenomenon has to start somewhere, and in this case, that place was a hammock on a beach in Panama. There lay Álex Pina, trying to dream up his next project. It was 2016 and the Spanish producer had just wrapped Vis a Vis, a brutal drama about day-to-day life in a women’s prison. He wanted this new venture to be lighter in tone and needed it to be cheap to produce— something that he could film almost entirely in a studio but with a premise so explosive that it would make you forget you were stuck within the same four walls. As he lounged, his mind drifted toward the possibilities.

What about…a heist?

Okay, yes, a heist. Pina got together with his team and soon they were on a roll. This heist would take place inside the Royal Mint of Spain (which would conveniently satisfy the real-life in-studio requirements), where the perpetrators would take the employees hostage and print billions of euros for themselves. The show would have the flashbacks and the ballsiness of Reservoir Dogs, spiced up with the surreal black comedy of Spanish director Luis García Berlanga. The characters? An outcast gang of career criminals brought together by a mysterious brainy figure known as The Professor. They were each assigned a code name corresponding to a major city: Tokyo, Rio, Berlin, Moscow, Nairobi, Helsinki, Oslo, and Denver (one of these things is not like the others), a random decision that would turn out to be inadvertently prescient. A wardrobe of crimson jumpsuits and Salvador Dalí masks would give the show a bold stamp of pop iconography.