‘Gordita Chronicles’ sunny, sweet version of classic family comedy
A conventional situation comedy unconventionally living on the streaming service HBO Max, “Gordita Chronicles” is as charming as it is often obvious; indeed, one might say its obviousness is part of its charm. This is family comedy of a classic sort— with a few significant differences — funny and appealing and sometimes moving.
Created by Claudia Forestieri (“Selena: The Series”), of Dominican Italian descent like her heroine, with Brigitte Munoz-Liebowitz (“One Day at a Time”) as showrunner, it’s a network-style memory piece, narrated from the future, like “The Wonder Years” (old and new), “Fresh Off the Boat,” “Everybody Hates Chris” or “The Goldbergs” (it shares the latter’s colorful 1980s milieu).
Olivia Goncalves plays 12-year-old “Cucu” Castelli, the eponymous “Gordita,” translated here as “little chubby” and considered a term of endearment back home in the Dominican Republic. Cucu’s family of four moves to Miami when father Victor (Juan Javier Cardenas) is hired as a marketing executive at an airline looking to expand its Latin American market. Mother Adela (Diana Maria Riva) looks forward to a new life and a house with a pool; fashionably thin older sister Emilia (Savannah Nicole Ruiz) is happy to be going to a school not run by nuns. Every family member gets individual storylines, though Cucu holds down the series’ center.
Victor has failed to measure his salary to include American withholding tax, so instead of a dream house with a lawn and a pool, the family lands in a lively Latino apartment complex in working-class Hialeah.
Although a good amount of comedy is mined from the strangeness of American ways, “Gordita” is not exactly a fish-out-of-water comedy, since the Castellis live in a community of peers, or near peers. (We are reminded, through the subject of coffee, that the Dominican Republic is not Cuba, which is not Colombia.) The population at the girls’ school is mixed; the popular Bubble Gum Girls, who adopt Emilia (causing her much anxiety over maintaining status), are Latina.
Prejudice, though acknowledged — Victor is mistaken for a drug dealer, because he’s a well-dressed Latino with a pager — is clueless rather than vicious, and mined for laughs: Anglos mispronouncing Spanish words or Victor’s boss saying, “I had a margarita yesterday, and I thought of you.” When Cucu gets lectured for speaking Spanish in class — Dade County, we are informed, passed a law that only English could be spoken in public buildings — it is the apex of the series’ political engagement.
Indeed, the plots could not be any more sitcomical: the premiere episode (directed by Eva Longoria, also an executive producer) turns on Cucu’s lie that Gloria Estefan is her aunt and will sing at a school dance.
While culture informs (and enlivens) everything and class can be an issue, they are rarely the point. The issues Cucu and Emilia face are familiar from middle-school comedies and the comedy of middle school; Victor’s challenges at work are not far from those faced by Darren Stevens on “Bewitched.” Adela deals with her visiting mother and a needy friend. Positivity and goodness win out; more than once, dancing saves the day.
It’s not easy to make something authentically sunny and sweet. Shock effects are easy; sex takes no effort to throw on the screen. But sincerity takes art. Apart from the novel culture of its characters, “Gordita Chronicles” breaks no new ground in comedy — it doesn’t need to — but its makers and cast are clearly in love with these people and their story. To have heart, work has to come from the heart.