Last week a new Netflix show was released; Elite. This was pitched as the new Gossip Girl and since I loved that show when I was younger I figured I would give this Spanish show a look. The whole first season was released and I can tell you I watched it all in about 24 hours!
Elite is about a Spanish elite high school. Three working class kids get a scholarship to the school after an incident at their high school. They aren’t really accepted by their classmates and things heat up fast. Secrets are revealed and everything leads up to the murder of someone in the class. Everyone is under investigation and you have to watch the whole season to find out what exactly happened.
When I first saw the trailer I didn’t plan on watching, while this show was compared to Gossip Girl it looked to me as a kinda cringe-y rip off. But I was browsing Netflix to watch something, as one does, and I saw Elite again. So I figured, why not give it a chance? And after that first episode, I needed more!
The story is told in 8 episodes that are all roughly 50 minutes long. Elite is a Spanish show and you have to option to either use the subtitles or listen to the dubbed version. I absolutely hate having to listen to something else than the actor’s lips are saying so the dubbed version was not an option for me personally. But if you don’t mind that, you could make it easier on yourself by choosing that. I opted for the subtitles and loved hearing all the Spanish. Before this show I didn’t speak a word of Spanish (apart from Si and Ola haha) but I think I’ve learned a couple of words since then. The way the story is told reminded me a bit of How To Get Away With Murder, where we get to see a little bit of the time around the murder each episode and then being shown how it all leads up to that one crucial moment.
As I said, I didn’t have the highest expectations for this one at all, but I found myself drawn in and after the first episode I was hooked. There was no way I was able to stop watching this show and I needed to know who was dead and who was the killer. You find out who died pretty early on in the show and the closer to the moment we get, the more people are suitable suspects. Some characters don’t seem to have a motive at all when we start the show, but after a while almost everyone has a reason to be the killer.
One of the things that makes shows like Elite so addictive is all the secrets. You want to know what everyone is hiding and who’s going to find out. By know I thought I had seen most secrets that a show like this could do but I must say I was wrong! Sure there were a couple of secrets we’ve seen before but there were also some unique ones. And I wasn’t sure what was going to happen or where the story was going to go. So I have to admit this show was more creative than I would’ve guessed upfront.
Another thing I really liked was the diversity we got in Elite. We’ve got some super rich kids and some really poor ones. It was good to see that the poor kids had to work jobs outside of high school to help out their families. We’ve got some gay characters (with the absolute best romance ever, my heart just fluttered every time they were together), there are moslim characters, one of them wears a hijab, someone is adopted, someone has a disease. I really enjoyed seeing so many different characters.
There was also some really interesting character growth, I can tell you that you’re feelings about certain characters will completely change in these 8 episodes. Some I hated at first but ended up rooting for, others turned out not so great by the end. The actors did a great job and I really enjoyed watching them. Even so much that after seeing that some of them were in another Netflix show as well I decided to start watching that one as well. But more about that in another Show Sunday!
As of now there hasn’t been an announcement for a second season yet, but the ending definitely left room for more. If the show does well the coming weeks I think there’s a good chance we get a second season. And you can be sure I will binge watch the hell out of it when that happens! Have you watched Elite yet? Or do you plan on watching in? Let me know in the comments!
