Lady Tabares sold roses on the streets of Medellín, slept rough as a child, and got pulled out of that life to star in a film. That is the first act of Lady, la vendedora de rosas, the RCN telenovela that ran for a single season of 78 episodes, from June 16 to October 1, 2015. It is also the setup for the part of her story most dramas would flinch from: the fame went, the neighborhood stayed, and the sentence came.
The show is built on a real woman’s life, and it does not pretend otherwise. Teleset produced it for Sony Pictures Television and RCN Televisión, and the series follows Lady Tabares from childhood to adulthood. Natalia Reyes plays her as an adult; Michell Orozco plays her as a girl.
Begging on the streets of Medellín
The series opens on the poorest and most crime-ridden ground in Medellín. Lady grows up sleeping on the streets and begging before she is sent to an orphanage. She leaves it after reuniting with her family, and in her teens she goes back to the only trade she knows: selling roses.
Then comes the turn. A twist of fate puts her in La vendedora de rosas, the film that won awards at international festivals and made her a star. The show treats that ascent as real but brief. Fame that arrives easily, it argues, leaves just as easily.
By the end of that arc Lady is back in her old neighborhood, selling roses again. The series does not stage this as a moral about wasted promise. It plays it as a fact of her life, and the flatness of that is the point.
Natalia Reyes and Michell Orozco split the lead
Majida Issa plays Fátima Tabares, Ernesto Benjumea is Marco García, and Yuri Vargas plays Yurani Bueno Restrepo, with María José Vargas as the younger Yurani. Carlos Mariño is Albeiro Bueno. Fabio Restrepo plays Don Élmer Candamil. Brian Moreno is Alex Candamil, Juan Pablo Barragán is Arturo “el Mono,” Aura Helena Prada is Hermana Ángela, and Viña Machado is Brigit Restrepo.
That is a lot of names, and the show needs most of them. A telenovela spanning childhood and adulthood lives or dies on whether the younger and older halves of its cast can hold the same character. Lady, la vendedora de rosas splits the role of its lead between Reyes and Orozco, and does the same for Yurani.
| Role | Adult actor | Child actor |
|---|---|---|
| Lady Tabares | Natalia Reyes | Michell Orozco |
| Yurani Bueno Restrepo | Yuri Vargas | María José Vargas |
Twenty-six years, thirteen served
The worst of it arrives late. Lady is sentenced to 26 years in prison for being involved in the death of a man. She protested her innocence and was forced to carry out the sentence anyway.
Inside, the series covers 13 years. She maintains a relationship with her children only by telephone. Her physical and psychological condition is described as unstable throughout.
That is a long stretch of screen time with a phone as the main prop, and it is where the show is at its most disciplined.
One season, 78 episodes
The show holds a 7.7 out of 10 audience score on TMDB, drawn from 1,491 votes. That is a solid number, not a remarkable one, and it lands about where the series itself does.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Seasons | 1 |
| Episodes | 78 |
| First aired | June 16, 2015 |
| Last aired | October 1, 2015 |
| TMDB audience score | 7.7/10 (1,491 votes) |
One season, 78 episodes, four months on air. RCN did not extend it, and the story did not need extending. Lady Tabares’s life has a beginning, a rise, a fall and a long middle, and the show spends most of its time in the middle.
What the show refuses to soften
Lady, la vendedora de rosas is a drama about a woman who got exactly what she wanted and then lost it, and it refuses to make that loss glamorous. The early episodes run on the same engine as any telenovela: poverty, family, a lucky break. The later ones run on something harder. Thirteen years of phone calls to your children is not a plot twist. It is a sentence, and the show treats it like one.
The 7.7 score is fair. The series is not a landmark of Colombian television, and it does not try to be. What it does is take a life that already reads like a movie — a rose seller plucked off the street and turned into a film star — and refuse to stop the story at the awards. Most shows about fame end at the top. This one keeps going down the other side, through the return to the street corner and into the prison, and it does not soften any of it.
Where it stumbles is in the middle. Seventy-eight episodes is a lot of room, and a life story with one clear rise and one clear fall does not always fill it. The supporting cast — Fátima, Marco, Yurani, the Candamil family — carries stretches that the central arc cannot. That is the cost of the format, and it is a real one.
The part worth watching is the last third. The show’s willingness to sit with Lady Tabares’s 13 years in prison, her protest of innocence, and the telephone as her only line to her children is what separates it from the usual rise-and-fall biography. It does not ask you to feel sorry for her. It asks you to keep watching, and it earns that.
7.7 of 10.
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