Television series

Élite

Name: Élite
Genre: Drama, Crime, Mystery
Released: 2018
Cast: Omar Ayuso, Itzan Escamilla, Miguel Bernardeau, Arón Piper, Claudia Salas

A glossy Spanish soap wearing a murder-mystery skeleton: scholarship kids collide with the ultra-rich at a Madrid private school, someone ends up dead, and the show spends the season rewinding to show you how. It's gorgeous, ridiculous, and completely unbothered by subtlety - all coke-and-cashmere excess, tangled love triangles, and class resentment played at maximum volume. Great for bingeing with your brain switched to low power mode.

TVMaze rating

7.3

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Wealthy community, a death revealed upfront, then a slow unspooling of who did it and why - the same structural trick as Élite, executed with far sharper writing and performances.

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Same rotten core as Élite: privileged youth who believe money and status make them exempt from the ordinary rules, told with icy restraint instead of soap-opera heat.

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Rich, bored teenagers destroying each other for sport and status, dripping with the same operatic nastiness and gorgeous cruelty.

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The blueprint for outsider-meets-old-money teen drama, with California gloss standing in for Madrid's, and just as much romantic chaos.

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