The story of Boris – the “series about the series”, one of the best satire products born in Italy in the last twenty years, from today on Disney Plus with the fourth season – is an interrupted story. The first three were released between 2007 and 2010 on Fox, at a reduced cost and with a very modest success. Something moved only later, when word of mouth and more or less legal ways to retrieve it online have fueled an increasingly less Carbonaro cult.
Then in the pandemic Netflix bought the rights, transforming it into the mass phenomenon that it had never been, such as to push the production to try again. At that point, however, at least one generation of fans had already grown into the myth of a work never seen “live” but made eternal online, slowly.
The fact is that the plot, written by Giacomo Ciarrapico, Mattia Torre and Luca Vendruscolo, is simple, at times close to sit-coms (at the time they were very influential in a certain type of comedy on TV), but full of phrases and of archetypes defined right there and typical of a small cinema, which must “bring the day home” amidst difficulties, squalor and compromises, developed so well that it speaks also and above all to the layman.
In summary: there is to turn The eyes of the heart, a low-key national-popular fiction about the sentimental intrigues of a primary; on the set, star star, scarce and egocentric (Stanis La Rochelle, i.e. Pietro Sermonti) and co-star equally diva and awkward in front of the camera (Corinna Negri, or Carolina Crescentini), talented director frustrated by the small pond where he has to descend to get a salary (René Ferretti, played by Francesco Pannofino, who confides only in a goldfish, Boris in fact) and assistant-soldier (Caterina Guzzanti in the part of Arianna), “slaves” (including the intern Alessandro, by Alessandro Tiberi) and laborers gruff taken from the underclass (Biascica, ergo Paolo Calabresi), listless cinematographers and cocaine addicts (the Duccio di Ninni Bruschetta) and scoundrel screenwriters (including the one played by Valerio Aprea), coordinated by executives such as Diego Lopez (Antonio Catania), plus pay attention to the budget and to political interference than to art.
The internal dynamics and their idioms – from the “cursed bitch” for the poor actress to the “come on, come on, come on” of encouragement by Ferretti, up to the “very Italian” of Stanis, but there are many phrases that could be quote – have crystallized in the common imagination a hilarious series, perfect in balancing hyperrealism and surrealism, underlying bitterness and prominent gags, in a choral story that explores the masks of the protagonists without reducing them to specks.
The sign of the times
Getting back to work like this was dangerous: an appendix can come out that adds nothing to the original, aimed only at fans, or simply a product that does not live up to the highest expectations. So for these new episodes, the screenwriters – who miss Mattia Torre, who died in 2019 and here honored by the presence-absence of his equivalent played by Aprea – have risked little, transplanting the original comic system into current events.
Twelve years have also passed in Boris therefore, and there is only to accept it: the interns have had unpredictable careers, the presence on social networks is fundamental, the generalist televisions they criticized in part have been defeated and now there is “the platform” (representing Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney Plus itself), with executives smart and sadists in “call” from all over the world. To her and her, her indecipherable “algorithm” must be sold Life of Jesussix episodes inspired by the Bible with the fifty-year-old Stanis (the one valued most and best this season) in the part of the thirty-three-year-old Jesus, and for the first time also a producer.
On the one hand, therefore, the series reconnects the threads: the original tics and the relationships between the characters are renewed with successful and coherent gags, whether it is Ferretti’s ambitions to escape towards “quality” or those of Stanis himself from the eternal goddess. , Lopez’s underworld agreements or Alessandro’s enthralling insecurities, who from an intern moved to a managerial role without the confrontation with such an iconic past ever being the real reason for the laugh.
On the other hand, even the satire of the system is actually fresh and centered: it jokes, in essence, on a crew of 50-year-olds who embody the worst that the world of work in our country can produce, and on its failure. to adapt to the ethical and inclusion codes that the “platform” imposes, but without ever ending up in criticism in the style of “you can no longer say anything”. When the algorithm asks the scriptwriters to insert a “teen story” into the biography of Jesus or of ethnic Chinese extras, the effects are brilliant and grotesque; when Tik-Tok enters the scene, what could have been a slippery ground on which to play comedy is resolved in a way, at least, painlessly.
A little for the physiological return enthusiasm and a little for the repetition of a series of consolidated dynamics, therefore, up to the middle of the broadcasts everything sounds pleasant, familiar, enriching. It is in the long run, however, that Boris 4 it betrays precisely as a series, for structure and for some novelties that seem great promises from the start and that do not keep. Above all the character of Lalla (Aurora Calabresi), the new enterprising intern and for this reason in conflict with the passive acceptance of Arianna.
It could be an opportunity to reflect on the approach to work of the new generations, to create parallels with Arianna herself and Alessandro who preceded her; instead a portrait emerges that is not very often, with a narrative path that is really abruptly closed and a subplot that is also interesting but only hinted at and never really concluded. Similarly, the executives of the “platform” are painted in a stereotypical manner but without having the necessary space to develop those profound comic flashes that made the protagonists of the series great, however they too are based on “masks”.
But it’s not just a question of space and room for movement. It is true that eight episodes are few by the standards of the house (the second and third seasons had fourteen), but it seems above all that the writers have had the fear – more than legitimate, and emphasized by the lack of Torre – of ruining what is nice done in the past, and therefore have limited themselves a little to the homework. Thanks to a writing that tends to fray at the end, as well as getting lost in passages at times approximate, even hasty, the feeling is that it is not a job up to the previous ones. Not that intuitions are lacking, nor that they are badly developed; is that it does not, for example, have the apocalyptic message of the third and at the same time does not develop any form of redemption, in addition to not taking into account in the conclusions how (and if) times have changed compared to 2010. As if it were an appendix minor and impromptu, a respectful but modest homage that takes nothing away and adds little. The generation Borisin short, it remains interrupted. Evidently it was also right.