In 1997, the movie Selena told the beautiful, meteoric, and ultimately tragic story of Selena Quintanilla, an iconic musical superstar who rose through the Tejano music scene and crossed over into global pop success before being murdered by her former business associate and friend at the age of 23. Now, 23 years later, we're receiving another take on the life of Selena, in the form of a prestige Netflix TV series. The trailer for Selena: The Series is below.
Christian Serratos (The Walking Dead) plays Selena in the two-part limited series, and the trailer shows her growing up, discovering her voice, touring with the Dinos, cutting all kinds of iconic tracks like "Como la Flor," wearing all kinds of iconic looks, and butting heads with her manager father while falling in love with a "wrong side of the tracks" member of her band. The series also stars Gabriel Chavarria, Ricardo Chavira, Noemí Gonzalez, and Seidy López. It's created by Moises Zamora (Star) and executive produced by Zamora, Jaime Dávila, Rico Martinez, Hiromi Kamata (The Exorcist), Suzette Quintanilla (Selena's sister and drummer), and Simran A. Singh.
As a fan of both Selena the artist and Selena the motion picture, watching this trailer couldn't help but feel like a strange sense of deja vu. I, very recently, attended a drive-in repertory screening of the Selena film, and it was packed with enthusiasm, proving the appetite and reverence for the original still exists. What will this series shed light on that the film didn't? I appreciated this trailer's focus on her bandmates, appreciated its lack of focus on the salacious crime aspects (though I imagine we'll handle that in part 2), and appreciate the casting of the Mexican-American Serratos as the Mexican-American Selena; there was not a small controversy in the original film's casting of Puerto Rican Jennifer Lopez in the film. Beyond these elements, so much of the trailer's rhythms, from the hard-staring father to the young Selena's singing to the usage of "Como la Flor," feel incredibly similar to the film, to the point of irrelevancy. Here's hoping the series can justify its existence with something new to shed on the saga of Selena.
Check out the official trailer and synopsis for Selena: The Series below. Part 1 of the Netflix series comes to the streaming service December 4. For more on the world of Selena, here's my interview with Edward James Olmos, who played her father in the original film.
Before she became the Queen of Tejano Music, Selena Quintanilla was a young girl from Texas with big dreams and an even bigger voice. Selena: The Series explores her journey from singing small gigs to becoming the most successful female Latin artist of all time — and the years of hard work and sacrifice the Quintanilla family navigated together.