Prison stories are already a subgenre of television fiction. It is the fascination that extreme situations arouse and currently there are two series that meet all the requirements to become excellent. On the one hand, the third season of Mayor of Kingstownwith a wonderful Jeremy Renner trying to fix all the wrongs that occur in a city where criminal gangs are the nightmare of citizens, mafias that arise from greed and the thirst for power. On the other hand, Condemneda Polish series starring the extraordinary Agata Kulesza in the role of Alicja Mazur, a ruthless judge who is imprisoned for a crime she did not commit, thus beginning a long pilgrimage among the inmates she herself sentenced.
Life in prisons, at least those in which the fictions take place, have situations and characters in common with those offered by life in freedom: hatred and love, hope and frustration, camaraderie and lack of solidarity… the whole range of what makes up a human being. Created by Ewa Ornacka, in Condemnedand throughout its four seasons that can be seen on Max (and Movistar Plus+), there is a co-star who embodies absolute evil: the prison director, played by an excellent Adam Woronowicz, capable of arousing all the animosity of the inmates and the spectators, a villain in which greed, ambition and a despotic exercise of power that identifies commanding with possessing are mixed. A remarkable series in which the skill of its scriptwriters manages to break the supposed monotony of prison life with a series of parallel plots in which revenge, resentment or passion are the queens of the house. None of this would be achieved if they did not have a magnificent group of actors and actresses and a seasoned and sober director, Bartosz Konopka.
In the third season of The Mayor of Kingstown (SkyShowtime and on Movistar Plus+) On the other hand, there is no love, no hope. Above all else, there is violence and death, a concrete jungle in which the strongest and cruelest survive. Aryans, blacks, Russians and Colombians fight for control of the city against an overwhelmed police force and in a city where the main source of income is the prison. This is Mike McLusky’s field of action.
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