In the recent ITV thriller After the Flood, floodwaters recede to reveal a corpse, setting up the series’ central murder-mystery. The Drought, or Sequía, finds television once again making the case for not pulling out the plug unless you are very sure there are no nasties lurking at the bottom of the bath. This engaging new Spanish drama, available on Walter Presents, begins with the discovery of skeletal remains in the arid basin of the Campomediano reservoir near the border of Spain and Portugal, once very much filled with water, now parched and ready to give up its decades-old secrets.
A radio news report tells us the Iberian peninsula is drastically low on water, with Spanish reserves at less than 35% of capacity. But the series opens in a downpour, back in the pre-drought times, as mysterious people drag a mysterious body (or two) through a storm before a gunshot hints at the victims’ fates. This gloomy glimpse at a soggier past soon gives way to the blazing sunshine of the present day. Those of us more used to the Nordic in our noirs may take a second to adjust to the fact that the sunlight makes everything appear at least 10% less sinister. Yet the heat soon works in the drama’s favour. Nobody is quite as they first seem, and you get the sense that the remains uncovered at the bottom of the Campomediano are about to have them all sweating buckets.
As the reservoir is close to the border, and there is a chance the bodies were Portuguese, we have a The Bridge-style culture-clash setup. I confess I am not familiar enough with the Spanish-Portuguese nuances to pick up on much of it yet, though I think there is a gag about mispronouncing surnames. We first meet Portuguese Insp Hélder Gomes as he’s chasing down a tattooed ruffian, and his colleague teases that he is “the most feared man on the streets of Lisbon”. For reasons that are not yet entirely clear, he gets himself unofficially assigned to a case across the border, so that he can extra-unofficially look into the identities of the skeletons discovered in the sand.
In Spain, he does a lot of lurking in the vicinity of the officer who is running the case, or at least trying to. Insp Dani Yanes is tough and she’s spunky so she wears a leather jacket, drinks alone in bars and has a few years of absence that are unaccounted for (though doubtless this will be remedied before long). Although her private life seems messy – she’s a competent female detective, of course her private life is messy! – she appears to be highly diligent in her work. She is raring to solve the reservoir murders and picks up on small details that others miss. Even so, she is having trouble getting the case reopened, not least because her superior, Commissioner Javier Ortiz, is taking a special interest in the investigation. Ortiz is due to retire after 43 years on the job, but is that really the only reason he keeps blocking Yanes’ path?
Yanes is close to a former flame, Óscar Santos, a journalist who is asking an awful lot of questions about the remains. He wants to know how long they have been there, because he suspects a connection between what has been discovered and activists who opposed the creation of the reservoir. Throw into the mix the wealthy Barbosa family, who own the reservoir and are powerful enough to put in personal calls to newspaper editors with threats to withdraw their advertising money, and the complicated power dynamics become intriguing. It is nicely rounded out by a folklorish backstory, of the village that was flooded in order to create the reservoir, despite considerable local protests. That the ghostly ruins of the old homes are now exposed again turns The Drought into something something of a modern fairytale. It is about power and greed, and set against a backdrop of a climate crisis that is directly attributable to both.
It is all relatively familiar territory for a thriller, but the circumstances of the case are juicy and I was entertained from the start. Be warned that a notebook might come in handy for the early stages. The cast of characters is large and, while everyone is, somehow, loosely connected, the connections are not always spelled out plainly. But lock in, and these Iberian heirs to Saga Norén and Martin Rohde should fill the Bridge-shaped hole in your viewing habits.
The Drought is available to stream on Channel 4’s website
