Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Hialeah culture clash at the center of new web comedy
A multi-generational Cuban family in South Florida. An American English-speaking newcomer. And the cultural clashes between the two.
It may sound a little like the classic WPBT-Ch. 2 sitcom “¿Que Pasa, USA? but this is “Hialeah,’’ a new web series set in Miami-Dade’s secondlargest city.
The bilingual comedy follows a millennial named Mari (played by the show’s creator Melissa Carcache) who talks her Jewish photographer husband Kay into moving from Chicago to her hometown of Hialeah. The show captures the humorous challenges between the husband and her family as they live together.
The trailer for the sixepisode series was released Sept. 20. Episodes will be available starting Oct. 10 on the show’s Facebook page facebook.com/ hialeahseries and also on the show’s website hialeahseries.com Oct. 12.
Carcache, probably best known for role as Lily on the Nickelodeon sitcom, “Every Witch Way,” from 2014 to 2015, said she wanted to do the show as a love letter to Hialeah and to showcase the city through a Cuban-American family like the one she and her friends grew up in.
“Hialeah is my home,” said the Los Angeles resident said in an interview last year when the series had a sneak preview at the Milander Center for Arts and Entertainment. “When you visit Hialeah, it almost like a different country. Everything is in Spanish … It’s really a city built on hard work, blood, sweat and tears and hope for the future. That is why the city is so great.”
She created the show with David Vargas who serves as the executive producer and director and Javier Moyal who is a writer and producer on the project. (Vargas is the brother of WTVJ-Ch. 6 anchor Roxanne Vargas.)
“We are trying to tell a story that has never been told before about what lies west of South Beach,’’ Vargas said in a video posted on Facebook.
“And what it’s like to be brought up in a Cuban family, a Cuban household,’’ added Carcache. “It’s definitely crazy.”
Carcache recently appeared in the Hallmark cable movie “Love At Sea.”