Elite: Polyamorous Pecadillos and Gay Muslim Thugs

I don't typically watch tv series where the first scene of the first episode is a close up of a half-naked girl.  But  I heard that there were a lot of gay/bi/queer/polyamorous characters, so I watched the first half of Elite to get a general idea of the content.

Elite is a Spanish teen soap opera, like Riverdale, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, or in my generation Beverly Hills, 90210, but with more sex, more boys' butts, and a lot more skullduggery.

The premise:  When their school falls down, three working-class kids get scholarships from the shoddy construction company so they'll keep their mouths shut.  They end up at the most elite prep school in Spain. 

The rich kids don't like them (obviously), but are happy to use them to push their various sinister agendas involving drugs, theft, corruption, and, as we find out in flash-forwards, murder.

1. Level-headed focus character Samuel (Itzan Escamilla, top photo), begins dating the rebellious Marina, whose dad is a billionaire industrialist connected to the shoddy construction company.

Meanwhile Marina has an affair with just-out-of-prison Nano (Jaime Lorente, left), who happens to be Samuel's older brother, has something to do with the shoddy construction, and needs money for unspecified debts.

Got all that?



2.Nadia, a conservative Muslim who has rather a chip on her shoulder ("I came here to study, not to make friends"), falls prey to a Cruel Intentions-style game to take her virginity and ruin her.  The players are Marina's brother Guzman (Miguel Bernardeau, left) and his catty girlfriend.











3. The obnoxiously brown-nosing "I'm here to get rich!" Christian (Miguel Herran, left) begins a three-way relationship with Carla and Polo (Alvaro Rico, below), who happens to be Guzman's best friend.

What better way to increase your networking than by dating two rich kids at once, one boy and one girl?









Yes, we see the bulges, biceps, and butts of all of the male cast, plus lots of extras.  The show actually pays more attention to the male physique than the female.












4. That's the last of the scholarship kids, but there's a fourth plotline involving the headmaster's son, gay-and-closeted Ander (Aron Piper, left).  With all the bisexual activity going down, he's worried about coming out as gay?

Ander befriends Christian, who offers to introduce him to his drug dealer-thug, Omar (Omar Ayuso, below), who happens to be Nadia's older brother, and has something to do with...well, you know.

The interconnectedness!  It burns!


Omar turns out to be also gay and closeted, and as the only two gay guys in a town full of polyamorous continuum-benders, he and Ander start dating.

With everybody interlinked with everybody, it comes as rather a relief when one of these people ends up murdered.  That's one less character to keep track of.

Beverly Hills, 90210 was never like this.