The magic touch

Most peo­ple don't like Mon­days. One US health site, Pre­ven­tion.com, even has a sec­tion called '12 Ways To Hate Mon­days Less' which is full of cute tips like 'check out a yoga class' or 'start your day with a romp in the hay' (sic). In Cat­alo­nia, for thir­teen glo­ri­ous weeks end­ing last De­cem­ber, our Mon­days were made less hate­ful by 'Merlí', a thank­fully un­cute com­edy-drama se­ries broad­cast by Cata­lan Pub­lic Tele­vi­sion (TV3). With over half a mil­lion view­ers, 'Merlí' be­came one of TV3's most suc­cess­ful se­ries ever, thanks to be­liev­able act­ing, imag­i­na­tive di­rect­ing and the care­fully struc­tured, twist-laden scripts of the se­ries' cre­ator, Héctor Lozano. At first sight, 'Merlí' seemed to be a Cata­lan take on the film 'The Dead Poets' Club': the epony­mous hero is a phi­los­o­phy teacher at a Barcelona state school whose un­ortho­dox meth­ods (and pen­chant for ob­scene lan­guage) de­light and stim­u­late his stu­dents even as they in­fu­ri­ate the more tra­di­tional teach­ers and par­ents. As the se­ries un­folded, how­ever, it turned out to be far more com­plex, deal­ing as it did with a wide range of themes of in­ter­est to just about every­body: ho­mo­sex­u­al­ity, sex­ism, sex in gen­eral, men­tal ill­ness, hope­lessly au­thor­i­tar­ian par­ents, and so on. Merlí, per­fectly played by the New York trained actor Francesc Orella, goes out of his way to help cer­tain of his more con­fused and un­happy pupils, but far from com­ing over as a lay saint, we grad­u­ally dis­cover that he has an un­pleas­antly ar­ro­gant streak in him, and that he also cheats un­think­ingly on his lovers (of which there have been three so far: one teacher and two mums). At the same time, the philoso­phers whose names sup­ply the ti­tles of the dif­fer­ent episodes sub­tly qual­ify each one's plot­line (for ex­am­ple, when Fou­cault's name comes up, the var­i­ous story threads all end up deal­ing with the ques­tion of what it means – if any­thing - to be 'nor­mal'). That said, I sus­pect 'Merlí''s suc­cess – like that of so many other good TV se­ries – is partly due to its ther­a­peu­tic qual­i­ties. Lozano said in a re­cent in­ter­view that this was the se­ries he would have liked to have seen when he was six­teen, as it would have helped him ac­cept his ho­mo­sex­u­al­ity (one of the main char­ac­ters, Merlí's son, is a gay who des­per­ately needs to step out of the closet). I wouldn't have minded see­ing it when I was six­teen my­self, given that back then I shared cer­tain traits with the men­tally ill char­ac­ter in the se­ries, the only dif­fer­ence being that he knows he's men­tally ill and I didn't. Watch­ing 'Merlí' would have em­bold­ened me to seek treat­ment in­stead of bot­tling every­thing up right through ado­les­cence. When I can look at the char­ac­ter in ques­tion, I re­call that dis­tant shadow of my teenage self and can now at least laugh about it. Not too heartily, mind.