Stream It Or Skip It?

Time Flies on Netflix is an Argentinian drama that is as much about the friendship between two recent parolees as it is about the criminal world one reenters in order to help get medical treatment for the other. But is it as simple as what we just described?

TIME FLIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: A woman is in traffic on a hot day in Buenos Aires. She sees her husband having lunch with another woman. “My husband led a double life. And I was his fly, slamming into the same window over and over again,” we hear her say in voice over. As she swats away a fly, she gets enraged and guns the car towards the restaurant.

The Gist:  Fifteen years later, we see the woman, Inés (Carla Peterson), doing fumigation work on plants with Manca (Nancy Dupláa), with whom she became close while in prison for killing her husband. When Inés was paroled, Manca gave her a place to stay and trained her as a fumigator.

Manca’s business is struggling, though, because many of her clients just can’t pay her right away. Inés is also struggling, not just to fit back into society, but also because her husband left over no assets for her to take advantage of. But when Manca continues to be worried about a lump in her breast, Inés takes advantage to call a doctor she knew in her previous, pre-prison life to examine her. The problem is, the biopsy she’s going to need will cost a lot of money — in dollars — and they don’t have private insurance.

After a job at the house of a wealthy woman named Susana Bonar (Valeria Lois), Susana specifically calls for Inés to come back to her house to spray some more. Instead, she wants Inés to get her some poison. It turns out that Susana knows who Inés is and what she did to get sent to prison, and because Susana wants to poison her cheating husband, she thinks she has a sympathetic ear in Inés.

Inés isn’t sure she wants to do this, and Manca absolutely thinks Inés, still on parole, shouldn’t go anywhere near the situation. But, feeling she owes her friend Manca for helping her get through prison and for the favors she’s done for her since her release, wants to get Manca the medical help she needs.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Time Flies (original title: El tiempo de las moscas), based on two novels by Claudia Piñeiro, reminds us a little bit of Good Girls.

Our Take: It seems weird to say that a show like Time Flies, which will likely have a lot of twists, is a pretty straightforward story, but it really is. Inés is trying to get back to a semblance of the life she had before she found that her husband was cheating on her, but in an effort to help her friend Manca, gets both of them embroiled in Susana’s plan, probably getting involved in more criminal activity than either wanted.

The series does feel like it’s going to be a show that has a little bit of a different genres, but nothing in a heavy way. So there will be some thriller aspects, some light humor, and a lot of relationship stories. In fact, we actually go back and examine some of Inés’ marriage, and what got her to the point where she became enraged to see him living a double life. But a lot of it will likely examine how bonded Inés and Manca were as the seemingly simple but lucrative task Susana hires Inés to do gets more complicated and criminal.

Performance Worth Watching: Carla Peterson stands out as Inés, mainly because she is good at showing that she’s loyal to Manca, and only somewhat regretful about her crime of passion.

Sex And Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Inés looks at the stack of $100 bills Susana gives her as a first payment, and she starts to imagine what she can do with the money Susana wants to pay her.

Sleeper Star: Osqui Guzmán plays Manca’s brother Rody, and he seems to be relatively calm in the face of the power being shut off due to non-payment and other vagaries of his and Manca’s lives.

Most Pilot-y Line: Inés’ voice over keeps connecting the behavior of flies with her behavior on screen, and that analogy gets old fast.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Time Flies has the potential to be a bit predictable, but we like the relationship between Inés and Manca, and the lengths Inés will go to in order to make sure Manca gets the care she needs.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.