It’s hard to understand now, at a time when franchises and fandoms come prepared and packaged for immediate consumption, the Serranomania of the early 2000s. Overnight, on April 22, 2003 (exactly twenty years ago) everything exploded for the protagonists of ‘Los Serrano’. And not only interpretively: in a brilliant transmedia exercise, Fran Perea released her first album (the secretly brilliant ‘La chica de la habitación de lado’) in October of the same year, and in 2006 the Santa Justa Klan filled concerts with ‘A all fuse’. But, And if we tell you that the bombing did not happen only in Spain?
All the way
It is true that ‘Los Serrano’ was adapted in countries like Portugal (‘Os Serranos’, which only lasted one season), Italy (‘I Cesaroni’, which not only lasted longer than the Spanish one, but also had a spin-off film that ended the series… without that everything was a dream), Greece (‘Happy Together’, which was a huge success but did not last two seasons) and many others. But, without valid adaptations, only using dubbing or subtitles, the Spanish series was also broadcast in many countries, from Russia to North Macedonia passing through… Finland.
Yle is the public television channel of Finland, which has three state channels and began broadcasting two years after TVE under the name of ‘Suomen Television’ (in other words, ‘Finnish Television’, in a display of originality). It’s not that the competition is fierce in that country, but when Yle decided to broadcast ‘Los Serrano’, he didn’t know that he would get an average of one and a half million viewers per episode (in a country of five million), turning Fran Perea into a sex symbol for an entire generation. No, it’s not a joke: in 2008 he was chosen as the sexiest man of the year. Almost nothing.
Such is the thing, that his first album sold 16,000 copies there and he even went to Helsinki on a concert tour where he even tried to speak Finnish (although, from what they say in the Youtube comments, without much success). The public was so devoted to ‘Los Serrano’ that even the Santa Justa Klan sold 7,000 copies of their first album in that country. It did not become the monumental success that it was in Spain, yes: although it is hard for us to admit it, the group sold 140,000 copies of ‘SJK’ and even had an official magazine that lasted nine issues (and its own gift agenda in the magazine Bravo).
Yksi plus yksi on seitsemän
It may seem like an unimportant anecdote, but the truth is that the fame of Fran Perea and ‘Los Serrano’ in Finland (where it was known, by the way, as ‘Serranon Perhe’) was such that, once removed from the series, in 2010, He came to publish his album ‘Viejos acquaintances’ there… And in 2020, when we all had a little lost track of him in Spain, starred in a Nordic thriller: ‘Kosta’ (‘The Paradise’).
In fact, it has been so successful there that they are already on season 2… And Perea hasn’t even had to leave Spain, because His scenes are recorded in Fuengirola, where several members of the Finnish community in the area have been killed. Of course, although he speaks Spanish, he is also more or less fluent in English, because He has to do the promotion in Helsinki where, apparently, they still stop him on the street.
To get an idea of the importance of the series in other countries, we are going to remember the moment in which the footballer Stevan Jovetic arrived in Seville in 2017 with a more than decent Spanish. No, he had not taught or spent his summers in Malaga: I was a fan of ‘Los Serrano’ when it was broadcast in Montenegro. We have no idea of the magnitude of the series in Europe: when Víctor Elías and Natalia Sánchez they went to Belgrade to meet their fan clubDozens of fans were waiting for them, shouting in the best Beatle style.
Maybe today in Finland and Serbia the media are remembering the twenty years of a pilot who emerged at a very sweet moment of Spanish series, before streaming and the loss of audiovisual innocence. What is clear is that we will not cease to be surprised to learn that in a pub in Helsinki that of “On a station platform, under the scorching sun” can sound without problems…
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