I’m convinced that if we’d have had things like Netflix when I was studying Spanish in school 1 million years ago — as well as music streamers, via the smartphones that didn’t exist yet, so that I could enjoy a Spanish-language band like Soda Stereo — I’d have aced all my classes and been fluent by now. Oh well, at least we now have a streaming giant like Netflix, to make the world feel marginally smaller and bring international content like the delightful coming-of-age series Eva Lasting to our phones or TV screens.
This is probably my favorite thing about paying for a Netflix subscription, by the way — the ability to enjoy quality streaming fare from around the world, while feeling like a lot of Netflix’s American content is … a little stale, to put it nicely.
Eva Lasting: A Netflix series about young love and ‘la primera vez’
Eva Lasting, which is also known by its Spanish-language title of La Primera Vez (“The First Time”), is just one example of what’s grown into a deep wellspring of top-notch Spanish titles available on Netflix — another of which, by the way, is Wrong Side of the Tracks, the second season of which is coming later this week.
As for Eva Lasting, this 13-episode series is set decades ago in Colombia and is built around a teenage love story that makes it universally approachable. And the best news is that Netflix is bringing the show back for another season.
From Netflix’s official synopsis:
“Set in the 1970s, this is Eva and Camilo’s love story. She is a mysterious, rebellious, and open-minded girl who is enrolled as the only woman in a school of 600 men. He is a peculiar and shy boy with no sentimental experience and inevitably falls in love with Eva, the first woman in his life. While Camilo tries unsuccessfully to win her heart, Eva turns the world of the Jose Maria Root Public School upside down, teaching her classmates all about sex, love, pleasures, and real life.”
Eventually, Camilo discovers that Eva is keeping a dark secret that could drive them apart, which sets him on a course to fight not to lose the first great love of his life.
More about the show
As of this writing, the show has a near-perfect 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes. “I accidentally put this show on, but within the first 10 minutes, I couldn’t stop and watched the whole way through,” one Rotten Tomatoes reviewer noted. “Was even sad to see it end. Easily one of my favorite shows on Netflix, definitely far from a ‘skip it’. It’s like the latin version of stranger things but without the monsters. Netflix — keep these coming!”
In a statement provided to a Colombian news outlet, Carolina Leconte, content director for Colombia, Argentina, and Chile at Netflix, also confirmed and elaborated on the news:
“We are excited that the fans have loved this series as much as we have and announce that they will be able to continue enjoying this story, which allowed us to travel back in time to Bogotá in the 70s, and continue to learn more about those characters that reminded us that after the firm time, everything changed.”
