Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love of My Life’ on Netflix, An Epic Telenovela Romance Set Amid Racial and Class Tension In Colombia

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Against a backdrop of the working class and peasant uprising in mid-century Colombia, a rich girl and one of the workers on her father’s cotton ranch fall in love. Netflix’s Love of My Life , which dropped on the platform with 60 episodes at once, spans decades of political unrest and an epic love story about forbidden lovers who managed to survive a revolution, family strife, and attempted murder to be with one another. And that’s all in the first episode.

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Opening Shot: A woman is led through a leafy jungle by an agitated man named Rogelio who tells her, “You’ll like this, Mariana, come.” Mariana is blindfolded, and we’re watching this unfold from her perspective, she’s barely able to see through a gauzy cloth, and when it’s removed, we – and she – can see two men who are bound and shot execution-style in front of her.

The Gist: The premise of this insanely dramatic show, which features murder and infidelity within the first sixty seconds of its first episode, revolves around Mariana Azcarate (played by Paula Castaño as an adult and María José Camacho as a younger version), an heiress to a cotton estate. As a child, Mariana’s mother was killed in an accident and her father Alfredo’s (Carlos Manuel Vesga) grief made him a bit of an absentee parent. So, Mariana began hanging out with the help, specifically Joaquin (Sergio Herrera), the black son of cotton pickers on their land. These early flashbacks, set in the 1950s, are full of the racist tropes you’d expect; upper class Mariana is castigated for hanging out with the dark-skinned workers, but there’s an added layer here: Mariana’s father also blames his workers for his wife’s death. On top of that, political and class tension in the country is raging, and Joaquin’s own family is not supportive of any sort of relationship between him and Mariana. As the two get older, their feelings become more romantic, a problem for pretty much everyone. When Alfredo gets wind of it, he’s furious. But before he can force Joaquin off his land, his workers revolt in a midnight uprising and attempt to break into the house. It’s broken up quickly, but now the divide between master and servant is not just a financial one, but it’s about to turn much more violent and contentious.

Mariana’s father hires a young man named Rogelio (Ricardo Mejía) to manage his ranch, and Rogelio, a strong, silent type, is also a violent type. There’s no problem he can’t solve with his gun. When Mariana learns she’s pregnant with Joaquin’s baby, she plans to run off with him, but before that plan can happen, her governess Ofelia secretly plots to send Mariana to a convent against her will, essentially imprisoned there, where she’ll carry the baby to term. Meanwhile, Alfredo, disgusted that his grandchild is the product of this interracial relationship, asks Rogelio to “take care” of Joaquin. Rogelio falsely accuses Joaquin of masterminding the midnight revolt and has him arrested. When Joaquin attempts to escape the police, once again, Rogelio takes matters into his own hands and shoots him, leaving him for dead.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? These kinds of sweeping televovelas aren’t uncommon, but this one reminded me of La Reina del Sur, maybe because they’re both enduring dramas that take place over many years, amid conflict and turmoil on a family ranch.

Our Take: It’s not often that one single show packs so much of a punch, so much establishing information into its first episode, but Love of My Life moves quickly, not just delivering drama at a rapid clip, it’s delivering huge, life-changing moments from one scene to the next. While it might feel daunting that the show has so many episodes to binge (60 so far), if you stuck with Love Island all summer, surely you can handle the same volume of scripted drama, too.

There are many details of the show that feel heavy-handed, from the racist, wealthy characters being caricatures whose every utterance seems to be a disparaging remark about skin color, to the choreographed fights that look like…choreographed fights. In that regard, the show definitely is playing up the melodrama, and not necessarily to great results.

Where it excels is in the actual plotting out and time jumping; characters are well-established and have a sense of purpose from the get-go, and it’s fun to keep watching so that we can see how certain references and plot holes are filled in as the show moves along. (And in some cases, the show is addicting because there are more than a few plot points that we can’t wait to fill in. For instance, Rogelio, the man who brings a blindfolded Mariana to watch an execution in the first scene, is the same man who shot Joaquin at the end of the episode, only now, they’re all much older, and Rogelio alludes to Mariana as his wife. Twist! ) There’s so much happening in this show, and yet it feels like a breeze to watch because of the smart pacing that keeps dropping bombshells throughout.

Sex and Skin: Mariana and Joaquin are shown having PG-13 sex a couple of times.

Parting Shot: Rogelio shoots Joaquin, whose body plunges off a cliff into the river below. His head bobs downstream. But we all know that, despite what Rogelio thinks, he ain’t dead.

Performance Worth Watching: Carlos Manuel Vesga, who plays Mariana’s over-the-top racist father is hamming it up pretty good here. His performance is not exactly good , it’s just addictive to watch because of how much he seems to relish delivering all of his unbelievably cruel lines.

Memorable Dialogue: “Poor people are poor out of choice,” Mariana’s wealthy, land-owning father explains as he surveys the workers in his field – workers whose class resentment is simmering and will eventually turn on him.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Despite the fact that there are so many episodes and the series is a bit of a commitment, if the early episodes are any indication, the show will be incapable of delivering a dull moment.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction .

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