Alpha Males

The Boys Are Not Alright

We’ve all felt that particular dread when a new comedy promises to "tackle toxic masculinity." You go in expecting a lecture, waiting for characters to start reciting Twitter-ready talking points instead of acting like real people. I’ll admit, when I started the Spanish series *Alpha Males* (or *Machos alfa* as it's known back home), I had my guard up. I didn't want to spend 30-minute intervals watching middle-aged men get scolded. But once I actually hit play, things shifted. I wasn't just laughing because I agreed with the politics; I was laughing because the show felt painfully, winced-inducingly familiar.



Created by siblings Laura and Alberto Caballero, the series opens with an AA-style meeting where the leads—Pedro, Luis, Raúl, and Santi—confess to being sexists. It’s a pathetic sight, yet it’s hilarious. The real magic, though, is how the story immediately rewinds to show exactly how these confused, messy guys ended up there. They aren’t monsters; they’re just outdated. Pedro is struggling after losing his status as the primary earner. Raúl calls himself a progressive while hiding a serial cheating habit. Santi is scrambling to keep up, while Luis is just trying to fix a marriage that’s gone cold under the grind of parenting and exhaustion.



Early on, there's a scene where Luis tries to jumpstart his sex life by buying a vibrator for his wife, Esther. It sounds like a classic sitcom trope, but watch how the actors handle it. Fele Martínez plays Luis with such a droopy, sincere exhaustion that it’s actually quite disarming. For anyone who remembers Martínez’s brooding roles in Alejandro Amenábar’s *Thesis* or Almodóvar’s *Bad Education*, seeing him here—softer, stripped of that cinematic "cool," and trying to enthusiastically pitch a sex toy to a tired spouse—is quietly brilliant. He lets his shoulders sag; he isn’t playing for the joke, he’s playing the desperation. That physical specificity is what really grounds the show. The Caballeros don’t try for a "prestige" look; the lighting is bright and the camera work is straightforward. But the editing is sharp, letting those awkward silences hang just long enough to sting before the next punchline arrives.



Now four seasons in—having just released its newest episodes in January 2026—the show has smartly moved beyond the basic "men vs. feminism" hook. The new season moves them into a shared apartment, navigating co-parenting and the murky world of middle-aged situationships. They’re attempting to rebuild themselves, even if they keep fumbling along the way. As critic Jason noted on Medium, the real stings this season don't come from societal shifts, but from "a lie told by a pillow partner." That's exactly it. *Alpha Males* works because it knows that while our vocabulary changes with the times, the raw fear of sharing a life remains the same. I'm not sure the show actually knows how to solve the problems it highlights, but maybe that's the point. It just lets these guys sit in the mess, leaving us to wonder why we recognize them so well.