Lying & Cheating
Episode 2 of Valeria begins with Lola meeting with Sergio outside who encourages her to agree to a fixed mortgage with him. As he starts pleasuring her out in the open, Val gets to work on her erotic novel, cycling through a number of different ideas in a cafe. She once again becomes distracted though as Victor messages her and, having had enough of writing for the day, messages her friends and asks them to read the first 15 pages of her novel. At the cafe, all of them have positive thoughts except Lola who struggles to relate to the characters and tells her they lack truth and realism, especially given everything feels too perfect. Val returns to Adri but when he tells her he’s not in the mood to have sex, she gets annoyed and instead heads back to her laptop to start writing. In the morning, they discuss Adri’s work and she encourages him to take the yoga gig. After a stressful day for them both, back home Adri looks at Val’s laptop and sees her search history involves multiple porn sites. He takes the imitative and immediately starts kissing her passionately. This leads to him making love to her on their table but she fakes climaxing. With a meeting with her publisher coming up soon, we cut forward in time to see Val starting to doubt herself until Nerea arrives and offers encouraging words of wisdom. Carmen meanwhile heads off to view apartments. Val is given the brutal truth by the publisher that her novel isn’t very good, going on to tell her to write about herself and actually make her stories real. Given her draft was late too, Val hurries out the room after throwing the pages in the trash, upset and distraught over what’s happened. That evening, Sergio and Lola discuss their affair and how to make it work for each other, especially given Lola turned up an hour late to their date at the movies. As she walks away, Val returns home to Adri where she admits to lying to him about the museum job. As they argue, she admits she was writing an erotic novel and faked her orgasm with him. It’s a pretty horrid turn of events for them both, and one that sees Adri walk out on her while she gets to work writing through her emotions. In the morning, Val decides to message Victor instead of Adri and throughout the day she texts and phones him. Things start to heat up between them though as he sends a picture of himself topless. When she receives an audio file however, Val goes one step further and starts touching herself, which is where the episode ends. As Valeria starts to settle into its groove now, it’s hard not to see stark similarities between this and Sex and the City. Lola is clearly like Samantha, Carmen is like Charlotte and Nerea plays off the Miranda archetype. All of this then circles back to Valeria herself who’s a difficult character to warm to given she’s lying and potentially on the verge of cheating on her partner. While I appreciate Sex and the City did give Carrie this angle when she cheated on Aidan with Mr Big, they weren’t 6 years into a marriage either. It doesn’t help that Val can’t take constructive criticism surrounding her writing and all of this culminates in a show that makes it difficult to really warm to any of these ladies. The soundtrack is pretty good though and there’s some nice editing too so hopefully things pick up from here as there’s certainly potential with this one.
