New television projects related to King Juan Carlos I. The last of them, XRey, is inspired by a podcast and it is international and multilingual. Starzplay, the international video on demand service premium Starz, and Sony Pictures Television have announced that they are developing an eight-part fiction series about the life and reign of Juan Carlos I.
Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, producers and writers of series such as Homeland and 24 and several Emmy and Golden Globe winners, lead the creative team that will adapt the podcast homonymous Spanish, produced by Álvaro de Cózar and Toni Garrido for The Story Lab and launched in 2020. The series in audio format includes testimonies and opinions from presidents of the Government, prominent historians and investigative journalists to review the life of the monarch.
Gordon has been very interested in Spain and its culture: “Few stories of the 20th century have attracted me more than the life of King Juan Carlos I. Beyond the overwhelming saga of his family’s exile, his accession to the throne and the intrigue Palace that followed, there is an intimate story about a man trapped between two worlds, whose personal sacrifice and love for the country ended up bringing democracy to the Spanish people. I am looking forward to telling his story over many seasons ”, the producer explained in a statement. He and Gansa will develop the television series in collaboration with Spanish production company Weekend Studio.
It was Tomás Cimadevilla, founder of Weekend Studio, who created together with the scriptwriter and director Lola Guerrero the concept of the series, which will be written by Helena Medina (23-F: The King’s Hardest Day), Susana López Rubio and Javier Holgado, both responsible for Temperance. The cast has not yet been announced or whether it will be made up of a cast of national or international performers.
Cimadevilla explains that, when proposing the idea to Starzplay, which since last year launched co-production in local languages in Europe and Mexico, it was the platform that proposed Gordon to lead it: “From the beginning we realized that it was an ambitious project that needed an international vision and a showrunner first level”.
More than a year after leaving the country, fiction and non-fiction projects that deal with the figure of the emeritus king have accumulated in the networks and production companies, but so far none have a release date.
The Mediapro Studio works with Javier Olivares, creator of The Ministry of Time, on The king, an ambitious script divided into three seasons of approximately 10 chapters each that will cover the life of Juan Carlos I, and the Spain of his time, “with a Berlanguian touch,” said those responsible at the time. And the production company Diagonal TV (Banijay Iberia), responsible for historical series such as The cathedral of the sea e Isabel, also communicated this summer that he prepares Royal Palace, a 22-chapter fiction about the Spanish monarchy with a plot arc that runs from 1900 to 2014. Atresmedia has its own proposal within the genre of non-fiction. Aitor Gabilondo, creator of the series Homeland, and the journalist Ana Pastor will co-direct the documentary series The Bourbons: a royal family.
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