Álex Pina

The school of mainstream television

Álex Pina started out writing crime news for the Diario de Navarra. That cold, factual reporting stuck with him long before he considered creating fiction for the small screen. In the 1990s, he joined the Globomedia production house, where he learned that television in Spain was a mass-audience business where you had to please grandparents and grandkids at the same time.

He worked on scripts for Periodistas and was one of the creators of Los Serrano in 2003. These were thirty-episode seasons with seventy-minute episodes. In that industrial production environment, he developed his instinct for the fast-paced narrative rhythm he would later apply. But the family drama format eventually wore him down.

And he decided to flip the board.

In 2015, he premiered Vis a Vis. It was his first major foray into a darker, more violent genre (prison drama) that moved away from situation comedy. The series introduced a far more refined visual style and a distinctive use of yellow. That project showed that Spanish audiences were ready for stories that didn't take place in a kitchen eating breakfast cereal.

The Leap into the Unknown with Vancouver Media

Pina founded his own production company in 2016 with a clear vision. He wanted full control over the storytelling and aesthetics of his projects. The first result of that independence was La Casa de Papel, which premiered on Antena 3 in May 2017. The series drew modest ratings during its linear broadcast, and many wrote it off after its second part.

But Netflix's purchase of the rights changed the company's trajectory. The platform cut the episode lengths to fit international standards, and the phenomenon exploded beyond Spain's borders. In 2018, the show became the most-watched non-English-language series in the platform's history up to that point.

The success wasn't an algorithm accident.

Pina perfected a technique he himself calls the Trojan horse. It consists of wrapping a deep emotional and sentimental drama under the cover of an action genre or a heist thriller. Because the viewer is interested in the plan for the heist, but what really hooks them is finding out whether the characters will betray each other out of love or envy.

Expanding the visual universe

After the global impact of the red jumpsuits, he signed an exclusive deal with Netflix in 2018. The agreement allowed him to develop projects with much bigger budgets and international shoots. In 2020, he premiered White Lines, a series set in Ibiza that mixed mystery with club culture and was partly shot in English. Critics weren't as kind to this title as they had been to his earlier work.

In 2021, he went all in on extreme pulp with Sky Rojo. The series tackled human trafficking with saturated colors and episodes of barely twenty-five minutes. It was a risky bet on stylized violence and black humor in a very sensitive social context. Pina kept his trusted team, with Esther Martínez Lobato as a key figure in writing the scripts.

And the time came to expand his biggest hit.

In December 2023, Berlin premiered as a spin-off centered on the most charismatic character in his masterpiece. The storytelling left behind the claustrophobia of confinement to focus on a Paris heist, with a tone much closer to romantic comedy and white-glove caper films. In 2024, the platform confirmed a second season of the series after it reached No. 1 in ninety-one countries.

The renewal contract signed in 2022 includes the development of a series inspired by the rise in bunker purchases after the pandemic. The project, titled The Atomic Shelter, follows a group of billionaires who lock themselves inside an underground luxury compound while the outside world collapses. The production features a real 1,200 square-meter bunker built specifically for filming on a Madrid soundstage.