Locked Up: The Spanish Prison Drama That Gave Us Zulema, and Never Lost Its Nerve

Locked Up, known in Spain as Vis a Vis, is the rare series this paper scores a perfect 10, and we will say plainly that it is our own verdict rather than a critical consensus. Created by Álex Pina, Iván Escobar and Esther Martínez Lobato and produced by Globomedia, it premiered on Antena 3 on April 20, 2015, ran two seasons there, was cancelled, and was revived by Fox Spain a year later for a third and fourth season. It is a prison drama that never once treats its prison as a metaphor. It is a place, and the show lives in it.

Trailer, via white_14.

Macarena

Maggie Civantos plays Macarena Ferreiro, a young woman set up to take the blame for corporate fraud and locked in a high-security women’s prison among people who have been there far longer and know how it works. The first season is her education, and Civantos plays the change from frightened to formidable without a single false step. It is a great performance in a role that could have been a victim.

Zulema

Najwa Nimri plays Zulema Zahir, a violent career criminal, and she is the reason the show became what it became. Zulema is intelligent, patient and completely without illusions, and Nimri gives her a stillness that makes every other character louder by comparison. When the series was revived and Civantos’s role was reduced, the show could survive that because it had Zulema. Few dramas have a character that strong. Fewer have an actor who can carry her for four seasons.

The Ensemble

Berta Vázquez as Rizos, Alba Flores as Saray, María Isabel Díaz Lago as Sole and Marta Aledo as Tere are the prisoners you come to know, and the writing gives each of them a life that existed before Macarena arrived. Ramiro Blas plays Sandoval, the prison doctor, and Alberto Velasco plays Palacios, and the staff are as compromised as the inmates. Itziar Castro, Laura Baena, Abril Zamora and Cristina Marcos widen the world in the later seasons.

Why It Earns the Score

Because it is tense, provocative and never lazy. The plotting moves fast, the violence has consequences, and the show is willing to let its women be cruel, funny, sexual and wrong without asking the audience to forgive them. Pina went on to create La casa de papel, and the DNA is visible here first: characters who plan, a clock that runs, and a refusal to soften anyone.

What Others Might Hold Against It

It is melodrama, and it knows it. The twists come thick, the coincidences pile up, and the later seasons take the story outside the prison into territory that loses some of the pressure the walls provided. Viewers who want restraint will not find it here.

The Verdict

We do not want restraint from Locked Up. We want exactly what it delivers, four seasons of women who refuse to be anyone’s lesson, led by one of the great television villains of the century.

Locked Up · Maggie Civantos · Najwa Nimri · prison drama · Spanish TV · Vis a Vis