Welcome to the Family, Netflix
You know those shows where you watch the whole thing and still can’t figure out if you love it or hate it? This is one of those.
A Catalan dark comedy — almost definitely the first Catalan TV series any of us will have watched — Welcome to the Family is a weird cross between
Modern Family and Weekend at Bernie’s.
It forces you to choose between keeping the default American overdub (I lasted about a minute) or rattling through the settings to restore it to the more comfortable but less convenient Catalan with English subtitles.
Once that’s taken care of, the first episode lays out the show’s slightly absurd premise. It centres around
ngela, an archetypal tough-as-nails single mum with a heart of gold (a la Sam from Better Things or Della from Raised
By Wolves or Rita from Rita), whose unconventional family (two sons — one white, one black, both seemingly well into their 20s — and a young daughter) get kicked out of their apartment.
Desperate times force the family, and ngela’s live-in brother-in-law, to go cap in hand to her estranged father, a mean, wealthy old man who looks quite a lot like Rupert Murdoch. When he drops dead, leaving his entire estate to ngela’s successful brother, she and his mad-asa-snake second wife decide to keep his death a secret while they figure out how to get their fair share of his fortune. Cue a quite odd mix of comedy hijinks — various setups to do with hiding a dead body — and earnest family drama.
It’s a bit all over the place, but does have a kind of eccentric foreign charm. It is film festival season, after all.