Elite Review

The first season of Carlos Montero and Darío Madrona's series is teen television at its slickest. Three working-class kids win scholarships to Las Encinas after their own school's roof collapses, the firm blamed for it belongs to a classmate's father, and the eight episodes cut between their first term and police interviews after a student is found dead. Sex, class and money are played loud but with care: Nadia is told to remove her headscarf, Omar and Ander's romance has real tenderness, and Danna Paola's Lu makes "querida" a weapon.

Rotten Tomatoes' consensus called it technically strong trash TV, which is fair. The photography is glossy and colour coordinated, the original cast, several of them borrowed from Money Heist, play the melodrama straight, and seasons two and three keep the machine running with new students and a new mystery.

Then the class graduated and the show kept going. From the fourth season the cast is replaced a few at a time, and every year reruns the pattern of new rich kids, a flash-forward crime and a finale reveal, with sillier plots and thinner characters; the sixth season scored zero on Rotten Tomatoes from five critics. It ended in 2024 after eight seasons, and the first three are the ones worth the time.