Indie Spotlight: ‘Spanglish’ Realizes Its Latin-American Comedy Dream

We receive a ton of tips every day from independent creators, unaffiliated with any major motion picture studios, television networks, new media studios, or other well-funded online video entities. The Indie Spotlight is where we’ll write about and shout out to a select few of them and bring you up to speed on the great (and sometimes not-so-great) attention-grabbing series you probably haven’t heard about until now. Read previous installments here.

In 2015, I highlighted the Kickstarter campaign for Spanglish, a web series looking to put a bilingual spin on sketch comedy. Five months later, Spanglish has arrived, and it has delivered precisely what it promised. Mariola Figueroa‘s series blends her Puerto Rican-American experience with the whimsical eccentricities of everyday life.

All of Spanglish‘s “lessons” hold the series’ central premise at their center, though some lean more toward cultural humor while others focus on big city life. The best episodes successfully blend those two elements in order to create sketches that are at once refreshing and familiar.

What most makes Spanglish worth checking out, however, is the degree to which Figueroa turns her show into an interactive experience. On the series’ website, for example, visitors can play games that double as Spanish lessons. These extras are welcome diversions from the main series, and they show how much Figueroa cares about her project. We should care about it, too.

OTHER UNDER-THE-RADAR SERIES TO CHECK OUT

• Unbound. The team behind series like Silent Brokelyn is back with a new show about David Bowie.
• Pathogen. This zombie series does a good job of generating a macabre vibe on a small budget.
• The Spy. An assassination sets off a chain of events in this political thriller.

Got a series you’d like to see featured in the Indie Spotlight? Be sure to contact us here. For best coverage, please include a full episode in your e-mail.