Cable Girls

He asked if they could twerk. Spain's first Netflix series was already about that fight.

Four days before Cable Girls went out, Pablo Motos sat Blanca Suárez, Maggie Civantos, Nadia de Santiago, and Ana Fernández on El Hormiguero and opened with reggaeton. He told the room that "right now girls are divided between those who know how to twerk and those who don't." Civantos cut in. "That's not a gender issue, men can learn too." He then stopped Suárez mid-pitch to count the earrings in her ear. Spanish Twitter spent the week calling the host a relic. The show they were there to sell is a 1928 switchboard soap about women who want paychecks, latestnetflix.com contends, not dance notes , , .

Netflix had already billed Las chicas del cable as its first Spanish original, made with Bambú Producciones from a concept by Ramón Campos and Gema R. Neira , . Season 1 landed worldwide on 28 April 2017, eight episodes, after a Callao cinema premiere in Madrid where Suárez wore a Vicedomini dress with a mesh back and arrived with her then-boyfriend Joel Bosqued , . The switchboard floor was shot inside the Fundación Telefónica building on Gran Vía, the old telephone company itself, not a backlot copy . Campos answered Motos on premiere day with a line that still stings in Spanish TV. "There's still a lot to do, whether you twerk or not." Bambú walked the jab back on Twitter that afternoon .

Suárez told Vanity Fair she learned about the pile-on from co-star Martiño Rivas and did not feel the insult in the studio. "I didn't live it that way." She also refused to let the clip get mixed up with the show's domestic-abuse plots. Civantos was colder. She called Motos's questions the kind of bar talk women hear every day, then said she wished she had said more on air , . That split, one star shrugging, one star keeping the receipt, is the premiere gossip that mattered. The switchboard quartet was never a single voice.

Who clocked out. Maggie Civantos did not come back as a regular for the fifth season. Early chatter blamed her calendar. She shut that down. "I decided four seasons were enough for my character," she said, adding that leaving Ángeles was the deal from the start . Ángeles dies of a gunshot. Ana Polvorosa stayed as Sara Millán, later Óscar Ruiz, a trans man written into a 1920s workplace soap . She won the Spanish Actors Union supporting prize for it, and the series itself took a GLAAD Media Award for outstanding Spanish-language scripted TV .

The run lasted five seasons and 42 episodes, which Variety called Netflix's longest non-U.S. original at the time of the July 2020 finish , . Season 5 arrived in two dumps, 14 February and 3 July . Part one was the third most-binged SVOD series in the world in its first week, per TV Time . The last promotional push included a short film about Magdalena Martín, Spain's last real cable girl, who kept a manual exchange in Polopos, Granada, until December 1988 . The official final trailer put Lidia, Carlota, Marga, and Óscar in one last fight and dated the goodbye to 3 July . Bambú and Netflix had already called it the end. There was no season 6 worth printing , .