Stream It Or Skip It?

The formula for disaster movies or series are all pretty much the same: Get introduced to the main characters, then watch them either die or be heroes when everything hits the fan. In a new Primve Video series, the disaster is a real one: The massive 1985 earthquake in Mexico City that killed over 5,000 people. But the formula seems to be the same as usual, except for one interesting thing. Find out what that is below.

Opening Shot: “General Hospital, Mexico Federal District, September 19, 1985.” We see a scene inside the hospital.

The Gist: September 19 starts off like every other morning. Ángel Zambrano (Osvaldo Benavides), an OB/GYN, is called into the OR to help with a difficult birth, and the intern who called him in, Dr. Carlos Vegas (Jesús Zavala), thinks Ángel took too many risks to wait out a natural birth.

Camila (Maya Zapata), a young television reporter, is learning to use the camera from Chuy (Olaff Herrera), the photojournalist she works with. He keeps telling her to be herself on camera rather than try to perform. Hilda (Azalia Ortiz), a nurse at the General Hospital, runs off to work, covering for a shift for Chave (Miriam Balderas), whose husband is taking a job in the U.S. Hilda’s husband José (Carlos Gueta) runs the hospital cafeteria and is very passionate with his wife.

Gabriela (Damayanti Quintanar) gets ready for work, irritated that her unemployed husband Alberto (Daniel Martínez) didn’t get the car ready for her to use. Alberto tells his son Beto (Gerardo Saldaña) to go to an apartment upstairs to get his older sister Lucía (Pamela Vargas), who seems to be spending a lot of time with a boy who lives there. The two of them are actually on the roof of the building.

At 7:17 AM, a massive earthquake, measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale, hits Mexico City. People run screaming and many buildings collapse. Ángel, who is in the cafeteria, manages to pull out José before the cafe collapses; they try to help people who are injured to get to the hospital. But soon after they get there, the walkway into the hospital collapses. José is buried under the rubble, and Ángel runs in to help the nurses and doctors get the babies out of the nursery. But Hilda and a few others are trapped inside with some of the newborns when the hospital itself collapses.

Chave, driving with her family, insists she needs to go back to the hospital to help. She’s the first to start sifting through the rubble when she knows who might be still inside. Ángel then leads the group to start searching for survivors, despite people like Carlos insisting they wait for the authorities.

Gabriela exits a cab she was in to go back to her family, but passes out after seeing the destruction. Camila pushes Chuy to get as much footage as possible, thinking that this will define them as journalists, but Chuy just wants to go home to his family.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Every Minute Counts (original title: Cada Minuto Cuenta) has a similar feel to the Katrina-themed Five Days At Memorial.

Our Take: While Every Minute Counts is a fictionalized accounting of people who survived the very real 1985 Mexico City earthquake that killed over 5,000 people, the angle that it seems to be taking is that the people they’re following are going to be among the thousands of everyday people who became heroes when the city was paralyzed and government officials seemed slow to respond to the disaster. That’s a fine line to balance on in 2024; most viewers aren’t going to be able to sit through episode after episode of characters being noble without at least seeing some flaws or conflict.

What the show’s writers are doing to combat this is to dive into the pasts of the various characters, starting with an exploration of Camila’s recent history in the second episode. There, we see her going against her family and leaving her fiancé at the altar, determined to move from Guadalajara to Mexico City to be a journalist. We will also see stories about Ángel and Gabriela as well.

These flashbacks will be interspersed with rescues and other things happening in the hours after the earthquake. So the heroism will be tempered by the character sketches we see in various episodes. Will those character sketches put these people in more of a compelling light? Definitely, though our feeling is that as flawed as these characters might be, the flashbacks will show the positive things in their lives that brought them to Mexico City on that fateful day.

What we want to make sure the show portrays is the devastation the earthquake left. An example is when Ángel finds the lifeless body of the father of one of the newborns in the rubble, clutching the Polaroid Hilda took of him and his son moments before the quake. The horrors and the tragedies of the quake need to be examined, including the deaths of characters we’ve gotten to know, for the show to have any resonance with people who weren’t there, or are too young to remember it.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Ángel looks at the rubble of the hospital. Camila dons Chuy’s vest and takes the camera herself.

Sleeper Star: Gerardo Saldaña’s Beto plays a bigger part in the second episode when he helps a younger neighbor who’s trapped with him in the rubble of his building.

Most Pilot-y Line: When José is pulled out of his cafe by Ángel, he grabs the blender before he leaves. When the two of them go to the hospital to find Hilda and the others, José sets the blender down, realizing that it’s not important. The camera focuses on the blender as the two of them walk to the hospital in the background. That shot isn’t as dramatic as the episode’s director might have thought it was going to be.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While there’s every reason to think Every Minute Counts is going to turn into melodramatic tragi-porn, we do appreciate the fact that the show’s writers will take time to reveal some background for the series’ main characters. That context might help keep the show grounded.

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.