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LOS GATOS, CA — Citing an exhaustive search of the historical record, Netflix announced Monday it would be developing a new streaming series about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, confirming that these remain the only two Mexicans the company is able to locate.
“We looked everywhere,” said Carolina Leconte, Netflix Mexico’s VP of Content. “We checked the whole country. Very big place. And yet, when our writers’ room asked ‘but who though,’ the answer kept coming back the same.”
The series, whose title has not yet been determined, will explore the couple’s love, betrayals, and artistic genius — themes Netflix stressed had never previously been dramatized in the 2002 Salma Hayek film Frida, the Paul Leduc film Frida, or any of the roughly four hundred Frida Kahlo documentaries currently available on Netflix.
“The fact that it’s a series gives us a very broad canvas,” director Patricia Riggen told reporters. “We don’t want to fall into the trap of a stuffy period piece or a magical Mexico. We want something entirely fresh, which is why we went straight back to Frida.”
Development executives acknowledged they had briefly considered profiling other historical figures before concluding that none of them had unibrows or large husbands.
“We did think about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” admitted one executive who asked not to be named. “Seventeenth century poet, proto-feminist, genuinely one of the most fascinating minds in the hemisphere. But then someone said ‘what if Frida’ and honestly the room just lit up.”
Netflix stressed the project represented a bold commitment to Mexican stories and that viewers should expect further bold commitments in the future, possibly involving Frida Kahlo’s house, Frida Kahlo’s diary, or a prequel series about Frida Kahlo’s eyebrows.
Emiliano Zapata, Octavio Paz, and approximately 130 million living Mexicans were unavailable for comment.
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