#mdt10

"More than a decade ago, screenwriters Javier and Pablo Olivares thought of a series about Spanish-style time travel, with a group of travelers who fixed the history of Spain. The idea unleashed an unusual phenomenon, in addition to the legion of fans with the name "ministericos", a torrent of articles were written that analyzed the construction of our identity, the educational and pedagogical contribution of the series and the dilemmas of overlapping temporality. The Ministry of Time caused Velázquez, the painter, to be a trending topic every night and now it is 10 years old. We celebrated it with Javier Olivares, screenwriter; also with Juan Gea, Ernesto, head of operations, veteran field agent; Jaime Blanch, Salvador, director of the Ministry and Francesca Piñón, Angustias, secretary of the ministry."

But on the 10th anniversary, Monday 24, there will be other events:

At 11:50 there will be an interview in the program Culturas 2 (@culturas2_tve) on the TV channel La 2 (you can watch it also in the RTVE Play app).

At 18:00, "El Ministerio del Tiempo, ten years of the series that revolutionized television", a conversation with Javier Olivares (creator), Anaïs Schaaff (screenwriter) and Marc Vigil (director), and Concepción Cascajosa (UC3M and editor of the book Dentro de El Ministerio del Tiempo) as moderator. The conversation wil be in the Degree Hall of the Puerta de Toledo Campus of UC3M, in Madrid, but it will be streamed on the YouTube channel @UC3M. The activity will be carried out within the framework of the R+D+i Project "Cinema and television in Spain in the digital era (2008-2022)".

From 20:00 there will be a meeting at Twitter using the hastag #MdT10, with some important fan accounts participating like @TiempoMinisterico.

"I don't want any more dizziness." Javier Olivares reveals what season 5 of 'The Ministry of Time' would have been like and what is needed for him to agree to take it back

The co-creator of the series also makes it clear that either it returns as a series or it does not return.

This Monday, February 24, marks the 10th anniversary of the premiere of 'The Ministry of Time', an acclaimed science fiction series that was never officially cancelled. However, almost five years have also passed since the premiere of its fourth season and the last we knew was that RTVE had rejected the idea for a fifth season by Javier Olivares at the request of the public entity itself.

At Espinof we wanted to take advantage of this anniversary to interview Olivares, co-creator of the series with his sadly deceased brother Pablo. In it he talks to us about, among other topics, which scene best defines 'El Ministerio del Tiempo' for him, what his plans were for season 5 and what would be essential for him to agree to take it back, historical figures that he wanted to portray in the series or how he would see a possible remake or a relaunch of El Ministerio del Tiempo' with another person at the lead.

The 10th anniversary of the series' premiere is celebrated and every fan of the series has a favorite moment from it. In your case, what is the first scene or episode that comes to mind when your memories decide that that day is the time to dedicate some quality time to the series again and why?

For me, there are iconic sequences. Like Velázquez entering the Prado Museum or that of Lorca and Camarón... But, in my opinion, the moment that defines what the series is is when Julián recites Leño's “Maneras de Vivir” to Lope de Vega. My brother Pablo wrote it. It defines (along with the following “Servicio de Habitaciones”) our commitment to pop without disregarding the classic. The irony… And the struggle that came with making the series. When I read it for the first time, I didn't even laugh. It was a chill, the stupefaction of thinking how someone like my brother Pablo, already immobile due to ALS, had the capacity to write with a sense of humor. Because I couldn't do it, I assure you.

It was also a symbol of production. One day, whoever was wearing it at the time told me - as a showrunner that I was - that Leño couldn't be recited, that it was very expensive. I didn't understand it: it was just reciting it, without music. For me it was key, the definition of the series. And I told him to tell me how much it cost and that I would pay for it on my own. Then, my lawyer (Javier Carrillo, an expert in these issues) got to work and it turned out that it did not exceed 800 euros. If I had not been executive producer, this sequence - the best of the series - would not exist. And I thought about how many great ideas would have been lost in our series because their creators (the writers) couldn't control the product.

Outstanding debts

All these years later, is there anything you regret about the series, either because you did it one way or because you just ended up not doing it?

As a creator and screenwriter, no. We did things wrong and others well. But it is what it is. It is no longer useful to say “if they had programmed us differently”, “if it had not taken so long to renew so many times”, “if certain actors had not left due to lack of continuity”… 'El Ministerio del Tiempo' is the sum of what we plan to do, what we were able to do and the fight against those inconveniences. They are our war wounds, but also our medals. It's a whole. And if you look at the results after ten years, the balance is wonderful. We gave the network its only Platinum, two Ondas in a row, Feroz, Iris awards, impact on social networks, we have fans in China, Russia, an association in France... And we created friendships that still last, a ministerial family. If you had told me before starting that we were going to achieve so much, I wouldn't have believed it. Furthermore, I am clear that the culture of complaint is useless. Only shit comes out of continuous complaining. Even when you have reason to complain, you cannot live settled in it. You have to show your face, yes. But then move on to something else. To create again.

The series finally had 42 episodes but I wish it had had many more. Is there a particular historical character that you were left wanting to tackle and that didn't fit into those four seasons?

Many. And concepts, stories... I regret not having dedicated more chapters to Science, as we did with Emilio Herrera. There are wonderful characters who were left out, like Isaac Peral. Or like Andrea Casamayor, a 17-year-old girl from Aragon, the author back in the 18th century of a mathematics manual for popular use and another missing book (advanced mathematics) that she could not sign because she was not a man and had to use the pseudonym Casandro Mamés... Topics such as historical fake news, such as the boy from La Guardia or what surrounded the Esquilache riot... The nighttime filming (on the same sets where Bela Lugosi filmed it) of a Dracula in Spanish. I think they just did this topic in a Mexican series, in fact. And I won't be able to do it anymore, when I had had it in my head for years...

Years ago you commented that you presented a season 5 but that RTVE rejected it, although without ever canceling the series. Of course, it wouldn't be the first time that RTVE recovered a series that everyone considered over, as happened a while ago with 'Los Misterios de Laura'. Would you still be willing to resume it or have you already completely closed your stage in the series 'El Ministerio del Tiempo'? Furthermore, at the time the transmedia universe of the series was very important, and perhaps not with new episodes of the series, but a podcast, a play, a series of novels. Would there be any possibility of continuing to expand the universe on that side?

Season 5, already designed but was rejected - after requesting it - by TVE, was a bit of a compendium of this. The patrol was new. With Andrea Casamayor, an officer from the War of Independence and a ram raider from the south of Madrid, punctually accompanied by the usual protagonists. In it the topics, in 4 episodes, were:

• The Beatles concert in Madrid.

• The appearance of an unknown comedy by Lope…. Whose protagonist is called Amelia.

• The portrait of the Prince of Wales painted by Velázquez.

•Canfranc taken by the Nazis, where half of Europe escaped, risking their lives.

•El Niño de la Guardia as an almost Trumpian prototype of fake news.

•And a Christmas special (my always dream) dedicated to the National Lottery.

As you can see, many outstanding debts would have been settled. But I would only take it back if I saw a plan, a love... I assume you don't want to do it, but I don't want more dizziness. This series needs a lot of passion. Of those of us who do it and of those who want us to do it. Regarding going to other avenues outside of making new seasons, The Ministry will either be a series or it will not be. No books, no podcast, no TV movie. All of this works around a series, not independently.

Did you already have any actor or actress in mind that you would have liked to have been part of the new patrol in that season 5 that did not go ahead?

I always have them, but there are several. But by not talking to them before, the rule is not to quote them. I'm sorry.

Another very common thing is remakes and new versions. 'El Ministerio del Tiempo' itself has had adaptations in other countries, but how would you see the possibility, perhaps not now but in a few years, of someone else taking up the series in Spain? Whether it's a more or less traditional remake or a relaunch in the style of what Russell T. Davies did with 'Doctor Who' and which is still underway.

If I knew of a future Spanish Russell T. Davies, I would be delighted. For his talent and for his social and political commitment to wonderful series like 'Years and Years' or 'It's a Sin'… He is the best showrunner of 'Doctor Who' by far. And with a third season of 'Torchwood' which is one of the masterpieces of science fiction. But there isn't and I don't think there is because our industry doesn't make series like that and, therefore, it doesn't generate creators of that type.

It is another type of creators... Different. Our fiction is produced, generally for platforms. And it has been abandoned - unlike in the rest of Europe - by TV. in open. With this, the concept of party, of adventure, of I'm going to sit down and see what they surprise me with... And share it on networks is lost. Each episode of El Ministerio was a party, with National Heritage tweeting and offering images from each era. With the Prado Museum, the Romanticism Museum… And the followers. All together.

Be careful, I'm not complaining about what there is. I complain about what isn't there. How am I going to complain about the platforms as a viewer when they make gems like 'Antidisturbios', 'Veneno', 'Nos vemos en otra vida', 'Querer', 'Cristóbal Balenciaga', 'La Mesías'...? I appreciate their quality, their creative risk and I understand their business model. But I think that those jewels are not seen by the amount of public that should see them. And that I would see them (without a doubt) in the open. But that is not the platform's problem. It is one of the few that is produced openly.

Without contact with the public, the creator becomes more auteur and less pop. And television is pop. Like Russell. Like Abbott back in the day. Like Moffat. Like Jed Mercurio… Even Simon, the “fuck the average viewer” guy, generated pop icons beyond HBO being pay-per-view. Because he was talking about the street, about today's society. For me, series are that: pop culture without ceasing to be entertaining, intelligent... Because pop does not imply that the public is assholes. There is the example of 'Line of Duty', which is a gem and has a share of more than 40% in open air. And without having to pay to see it on a platform, something that - it has been studied - is opening a social gap in the consumption of fiction. 'Isabel', 'El Ministerio del Tiempo' start from that popular base. If someone makes a remake one day, I hope they don't forget it. With that, it's fine for me.

Well, and that one day TVE will have the cultural support it deserves from politicians, to understand that it could be the BBC in Spanish instead of a model without media and competing with the private ones with the same weapons too often. But this may be asking too much at this point, when so many opportunities and time have been lost. In the 1980s, the then French president Mitterrand, faced with the emergence of powerful private channels (Canal+, La Cinq, TV6 and TF1), had the idea of creating a cultural and educational channel with a European vocation (La Sept). In 1986, a working group was created (after a Mitterrand-Kohl summit) with the aim of strengthening Europe's weight in audiovisual communication which, two years later, resulted in the creation of the ARTE1 channel, a Franco-German public service channel.

What do you think?

The three Spains and a frustrated fifth season: the secrets of a 'Ministry' that "endures time very well"

Javier Olivares, co-creator of 'El Ministerio del Tiempo', reflects on the legacy of the TVE series and gives details of the episodes that were never filmed.

Every story has a beginning (and, in principle, an end) and that of El Ministerio del Tiempo, the adventure series that aired La 1 of TVE between 2015 and 2020, goes back twenty years when its creators, the brothers Pablo and Javier Olivares, set out – while they were drinking beers – to write a series that they would like to see as viewers, but that they knew would never be made.

In between, around 2007, they developed the Spanish adaptation of the series Life on Mars, a police officer who travels to the past, to the seventies, after a car accident. Diagonal TV was going to be in charge of its production (Amar En Tiempos Revueltos, Isabel) and they even started a conversation with British public television, the BBC, for said remake they titled it La Leyenda del Tiempo. If the English had David Bowie; the Spanish had Camarón.

In the end, Antena 3 bought the rights and commissioned it to another production company. The result was La Chica de Ayer (2009), whose title responded to a song by Nacha Pop (1980), ahead of the time on which the series was based (1977).

Anachronies aside, Javier Olivares payed off an old score in the fourth season of El Ministerio del Tiempo. The second episode, in which the patrol of civil servants and time travelers has to obtain financing for Pedro Almodóvar's second film (Laberinto de Pasiones) and for the filmmaker from La Mancha to hire Antonio Banderas as the protagonist, ends with a performance of David Bowie's song Life on Mars. Thus a circle was closed; one of many.

"I was certain that there were not going to be more seasons. I wanted to close the story of the characters. I owed it to the characters, the actors and the audience. With greater or lesser success," recalls Javier Olivares in conversation with El Independiente. This Monday, February 24, marks a decade since the premiere of the first chapter of The Ministry of Time; the first of a total of 42, which, by the way, are not available in full on RTVE Play (yes on HBO Max...)*.

A series of adventures in front of and behind the cameras, since it was not easy, the schedules, late renewals, departure of interpreters and, therefore, rewriting of bibles, that is, the skeleton of each batch of deliveries. More than two years passed between the filming of the third and fourth seasons, so they were paying for a set that finally collapsed. In fact, in the last season, due to budgetary issues, they were unable to build a set. But they found a solution: an old Spanish National Radio building on the outskirts of Madrid where they could decorate.

"When I finish a season, I always think that there won't be another one. And El Ministerio del Tiempo has shown me that. What I don't like is leaving a series unfinished. It was necessary to put an end to it so that, if suddenly there was a new season, it would already be a new patrol," he continues.

Then TVE asked Javier Olivares for a fifth season of El Ministerio del Tiempo. With Star Trek (and its sequels) and Doctor Who (and the physical regenerations of its owner) in mind, the scriptwriter planned a renewal while maintaining the essences. That fifth season was going to be the shortest, of four episodes, to turn its broadcast into an event, and it was going to feature a new protagonist patrol, made up of a female mathematician from the late 17th century, a lieutenant from the War of Independence (1808-1814) and a young ram raider from 2020.

They were going to talk about fake news, the invention of the submarine, The Beatle's performance in Las Ventas (Madrid)… and there was going to be a Christmas special with the story of La Lotería. "Tornero [the then president of RTVE] said it was very expensive and the door was closed," Olivares recalls. Like that other door that closed between the second and third seasons of The Ministry of Time when the possibility of moving to a platform arose...

"Each season is what it inherits from the previous ones. It's better not to think about what would have been and wasn't. You play with the instruments they give you and I'm delighted with how the fourth season turned out," acknowledges Olivares.

If in that fourth and final season he had to remake the bible after the departure of the actress Macarena García (Lola Mendieta) during the halfway point, in the second it already happened with its protagonist, Rodolfo Sancho (Julián). If he hadn't fallen out of the cast, perhaps the merger between Lorca and Camarón would have happened sooner...

"The character of Rodolfo [Sancho] was basic in the first season and a reflection of my brother [Pablo]," recalls the co-creator. But as soon as one goes out the window, another comes in the door, since Hugo Silva won the affection of the screenwriter ("For me, one of the great discoveries of the series is Pacino") and the public. With Julián's departure and Pacino's replacement, there was a third party in contention, Amelia (Aura Garrido).

But Olivares did not succumb to the love affair: "Already with Isabel, in the first season, I did not do a love story. I did the love story that was historically as I told it. I did not entangle it or turn it into an affair. And in El Ministerio del Tiempo, the same: I did not want to do a stable love story for anyone."**

The series itself also didn't marry anyone. Each of its three original protagonists represented one of the three Spains: Amelia (progressivism, feminism), Alonso (loyalty, Christianity, patriotism) and Julián, "who is fed up with the two Spains fighting and wants to have a beer in peace." The three, with their differences, rowed together in the same boat. "They did not fight among themselves. They fulfilled a function as patriots, as civil servants of a ministry," he adds.

Even so, he was accused of politicization and turning to the left: "It is not a political series, but everything is political. It is a series of adventures, but obviously we talk about corruption, inequality, that everyone loses wars... We can't have a party with Lorca, or do we? We also gave a comical twist to many things, like Velázquez, Lorca...".

Olivares recommends that the most critical review the first season, whose last chapter, set in the Madrid Student Residence, "has the same social, but not political, burden as the rest of the series. The pilot episode, essentially written by his brother Pablo, is one of his favorites along with two others from the second season, those starring El Cid and Felipe II.

Still, the third season of El Ministerio del Tiempo was a turning point after experimenting in the second, jumping from one genre (pure comedy with Napoleon) to another (pure drama with the Spanish flu) in each episode. A painting by Goya, Duelo a garrotazos, inspired that third volume.

"The third season was the darkest. There was a very hard plot, that of the two Spains. Since the 19th century, people of different ideologies killing each other. It was the hardest in terms of sadness and also the hardest in terms of production. In the first two seasons we had a first-class technical cast. We had Goya award winners in our ranks. All those people came for a cheaper price with the condition that, if a movie came out, they would leave, but they would come back. You can use them as a favor in that moment of passion and epic because everyone knew that we were doing a different series. But It was something you couldn't stretch," Olivares admits.

There were times to which they did not travel (Al-Andalus, Roman Spain) due to budgetary and even language issues ("They did not speak Spanish") and ideas that did not prosper because they did not have a good script, such as fake news. Olivares would have liked to create a episode on the Santo Niño de La Guardia ("a myth about some Jews who martyred a Christian child, the Inquisition arrived and took charge of the culprits as a milestone of Christianity, but it had never disappeared for a year, there was no case, there were rumors that became reality because it was of interest at that time") or on the way in which the minister Esquilache was expelled from Spain at the end of the 18th century for trying to modernize the kingdom.

He would also have liked to integrate the curious filming of Dracula (1931) into the plot, during the day with an Anglo-Saxon cast and at night with a Spanish-speaking cast; What didn't change were the sets. Olivares recognizes that they should have given more scope to scientific culture (he redeemed himself with Emilio Herrera, the creator of the diving suit, to whom he dedicated an episode of the fourth season). "I would have loved to tell the story of table football. There was no time for everything," says Olivares.

But let's go back to the beginning, since fiction allows it. Pablo and Javier Olivares returned to the idea of The Ministry of Time after abandoning Isabel (2012), once the first season had been created and written, due to creative differences. Pablo, already diagnosed with ALS, asked his brother to develop that idea they had while they were drinking beers years ago. TVE bought it almost immediately, but it took them a year to find a traveling companion, producer José María Irisarri: "Before, we negotiated with four important production companies and the conditions prevented us from making our decision: they did not want a showrunner. There was total resistance to a scriptwriter being an executive producer – TVE's request –. We proposed an Anglo-Saxon model in which we carried out the creative part with the network without intermediaries. It was one of the most unpleasant moments."

"Olivares took the lead in the end and had decision-making power even in choosing the cast: "We were clear about all of them except one, proposed by TVE. We were very clear about Víctor Clavijo. It was the first one we were clear about. We had always spoken with Rodolfo [Sancho] because we needed an important name. He was part of the family [he played Fernando de Aragón in Isabel] and he signed up. A very clear one that I chose was Nacho Fresneda. And Aura Garrido. "We had doubts between Jaime Blanch and Luis Valera because we wanted an actor who represented traditional Spanish television, an icon."

Javier Olivares has never seen his own creation again. "I have occasionally seen an episode," he admits. "When they show it on television***, I stay to watch it. It strikes me that, despite its age, it holds up very well over time."

* yes, on RTVE Play season 4 is not available at this moment, but in HBO Max it is available.

** I would argue that's not exactly true, like there's some canon relationships like Alonso/Elena or Julián/Maite that have become very important for much of the series.