Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Horario Estelar’ On Hulu, Where A Star Journalist Investigates A Death He Was Involved In

Shows where someone has a secret that becomes harder to keep as authorities and others get closer to discovering the truth can go one of two ways: They can be riveting and shocking a la Breaking Bad, or they can get sillier and more insane, like Steven Moffat’s Inside Man. A new series from Mexico looks like it might be more the latter than the former, but who knows? It may surprise us.

Opening Shot: Scenes from the control room and set of a news program.

The Gist: Ramiro del Solar (Óscar Jaenada) is one of the top journalists in Mexico; and we see how respected he is during an episode of his show The Whole Truth, where he holds a government official accountable for his association with a developer who may have set a wildfire. He is ethical to a fault, like when the owner of the network he works for tells him to lay off this investigation, but Ramiro tells him that his independent journalism gets them ratings.

He seems to have a happy family life, with wife Bernarda Díaz (Dominika Paleta), and daughter Jimena (Ela Velden), who works on her father’s show and has been getting treatment for some mental health issues. Jimena’s best friend is Olympic swimmer, model, and influencer Alexia Valle (Pamela Almanza).

But Ramiro has secrets, namely the fact that he’s having an affair with Alexia, who lives in the same building. After one lovemaking session, she goofs around by taking pictures of a naked Ramiro coming out of the shower. As he tries to grab the phone from her to delete those pictures, Alexia accidentally slips and hits her head on the edge of her tub, instantly killing her.

Instead of calling 911, though, Ramiro desperately wants to scrub any evidence that he was even there. He goes so far as taking the towel he had on, Alexia’s cell phone and other material and dumping it in a river outside of the city. Then he tries to go on as if nothing happened. He even goes back and retrieves a card given to him by an annoying real estate investor right before he got to Alexia’s apartment.

Eventually, though, Alex’s body is found — Jimena takes her dad down to Alex’s apartment when Alex’s mother reports there’s been no contact. He has to think fast, especially as the prosecutor, Platas (Mauricio Isaac) and police officer Alfonso León (Juan Carlos Vives) question him and his family. He decides to lead his next newscast with Alexia’s death, and after getting word from Platas that there may have been someone else in the bathroom with her when she died, he tells his audience he’s launching his own investigation into her death.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Horario Estelar (Translation: Prime Time) crosses one of those “everyone has a secret” shows, like Tell Me Your Secrets, with a news-show-oriented drama like The Morning Show. In fact, we couldn’t shake the notion that Óscar Jaenada looks a lot like TMS‘s Billy Crudup.

Our Take: Created by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, Horario Estelar depends fully on just how nefarious its main character is. Ramiro del Solar knows what’s at stake if he’s placed at the scene of Alexia’s death; his wife will leave him, his daughter will hate him for not only having an affair with but contributing to the death of her best friend, and his career as Mexico’s most trusted journalist will be over. If his machinations feel like they’re bordering on ridiculous, or the people around him act like they’re idiots, the entire series is going to fail to connect with viewers.

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We saw some of this during the scene where Ramiro is trying to snatch the phone from Alexia. We’ve watched more than enough shows like this to know that no good would come from this scene. Because we knew where it was going, we got a bad feeling that Ramiro was going to be able to get away with his part in her death because of a series of ridiculous coincidences, situations that strain reality, and general stupidity on the part of the people he’s trying to fool. It’s the same feeling we got with David Tennant’s portion of the series Inside Man, in which its characters jump through many narrative hoops to push things forward.

But for all we know, Cohn and Duprat have written Ramiro to be so smart that we root for him to get away with it as people like Platas close in on the truth. How he’s going to use his journalistic skills to throw people off his trail is going to be the key to everything in this series, and we’re just not sure that a story like this can sustain itself over 10 episodes.

Sex and Skin: Ramiro and Alexia have sex, though we don’t really see any real nudity.

Parting Shot: Ramiro tells his viewers that he will personally investigate Alexia’s death.

Sleeper Star: Maya Zapata plays Julia Torrado, the executive producer of Ramiro’s show. She relishes catching politicians in their lies, so we wonder if she’s going to start to catch onto what Ramiro is shoveling when it comes to his “investigation” of Alexia’s death.

Most Pilot-y Line: Not sure why, but we were highly distracted by the sight of a full grill inside the kitchen during the scene where Alexia visits Ramiro and his family for lunch. We hope it was an electric grill, but it looked like a gas grill. How is that possible? And where does the smoke go?

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re tentatively recommending Horario Estelar because for now we buy the fact that its main character is going to look for any way possible to deflect attention away from him, but we also get a bad feeling that things are going to get pretty silly as his secret gets closer to being revealed.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.