A rom-com that opens at a funeral
A romantic comedy that starts at a funeral and piles on an unplanned pregnancy and a cancer diagnosis within the first stretch feels like a dare. That’s the hook of Apple TV+’s Spanish-language series Love You to Death (released in Spain as “A Muerte”), an eight-episode gamble that asks whether love can bloom when life is doing its level best to slam every door shut.
The premise is simple and blunt: Raúl and Marta meet among wreaths and whispered condolences, spark against the odds, and end up dealing with two life events that would rock any couple—never mind one that barely knows each other. The show comes from creator-director Dani de la Orden with collaborators Natalia Durán and Oriol Capel, names familiar to Spanish TV fans for character-first comedies that push into bittersweet territory. Apple TV+ premieres the series on February 5, 2025, a date that fits the platform’s ongoing push into non-English originals after successes like Acapulco and the bilingual thriller Now & Then.
Early coverage has muddied casting credits—some outlets name Amargós and Echegui as leads—while Spanish press materials and listings have tied the characters to actors like Quim Gutiérrez (Raúl) and Ingrid García-Jonsson (Marta). If you see different pairings in reviews, you’re not imagining it; the confusion says more about rollout hiccups than the show itself. On screen, the chemistry is the constant. The leads catch that jittery, early-relationship voltage where every glance is a question and every text feels like a test.
The pilot has taken flak for a sluggish start, and that’s fair. It loiters in mood-setting: slow walks, tentative banter, lingering looks. Once the central relationship gets room to breathe, the series loosens up. The pacing shift is noticeable—a quiet first episode gives way to a mid-season run where conversations snap, jokes land, and the emotional stakes feel earned instead of imposed.
What makes the show feel different isn’t just its plot. It’s the unapologetically Spanish flavor. Marta’s orange pixie cut is a character choice and a cultural pin. The apartments are compact and lived-in, all patterned tile and tight kitchens that open onto little patios sagging with plants. The city looks sun-worn rather than glossy, which fits the story’s mix of absurd mishap and everyday grind.
One set piece stands out: Saint John’s Eve, Spain’s summer-solstice blowout where beaches glow with bonfires, people jump waves for luck, and handwritten wishes curl into ash. The sequence isn’t window dressing. It gives the relationship a ritual—a public moment that doubles as a private pact—while rooting the show in a tradition American rom-coms rarely touch.
The tonal balance is hard to pull off. There’s gallows humor—how could there not be?—but the writing keeps swerving back to the small, normal rhythms that illness and an unexpected pregnancy interrupt but don’t erase. You still have to answer your mom’s calls. You still forget the milk. You still pretend you understand a doctor’s jargon so you don’t scare each other.
Where the series wins—and where it trips
The biggest structural gamble is also the soft spot. By racing into crisis mode, the script skips the prelude that would define who Raúl and Marta are before life tilts the board. We spend just minutes with a cancer-free Raúl and less than half an episode with Marta before the pregnancy changes her. Critics aren’t wrong to say this blurs the show’s central idea: how extraordinary stress can transform two very different people. Without a clear “before,” the “after” reads as two well-adjusted adults keeping calm and carrying on. That sands off the sharper edges the premise promises.
When the writing lets the actors lead, things click. Their chemistry doesn’t roar; it hums. You feel the stumbles—the awkward appointments, the boundary-setting that never sticks, the way big decisions get made in cramped hallways because that’s where they happen in real life. Physical affection is casual and constant, which matters in a story that could easily turn clinical. They touch shoulders in pharmacies. They share earbuds on the metro. These tiny gestures do more character work than some full scenes.
Marta’s arc needs more oxygen. She’s sold as the wild card to Raúl’s cautious planner, but the show rarely lets her act beyond the roles of patient and expectant mother. We’re told she’s impulsive. We mostly see her react. That mismatch keeps her at arm’s length, especially when the plot asks us to track her growth against daunting stakes. A couple of flashbacks—or even one episode told purely from her point of view—would fix a lot.
Some jokes creak. The series occasionally digs up humor that would’ve felt fine a decade ago: a throwaway about gender roles here, a wink about therapy there. None of it derails the vibe, but these beats pull you out of a world that otherwise feels current and emotionally precise. The better gags grow from specific behavior: the couple negotiating how to tell family; the logistics of scheduling intimacy around blood tests; a bureaucratic mess that turns a clinic visit into a scavenger hunt for forms and stamps.
Craft-wise, the show opts for warmth over polish. Colors lean honeyed and sun-baked. Interiors feel slightly cluttered in a way that reads as real, not staged. The camera hangs back, letting conversations breathe, and nudges closer only when silence is doing more work than dialogue. This restraint helps when the story edges near melodrama; it keeps the scenes grounded in bodies, breath, and looks.
The medical material is handled with respect, if not documentary detail. Don’t expect a treatment plan blown up on a whiteboard or long speeches about survival stats. The focus is on how information lands in a couple’s life—what you tell parents, what you hide from friends, what you confess at 3 a.m. when no one else is awake. That choice will frustrate viewers hunting for hospital-procedural precision and relieve those who want the human beat-by-beat instead.
As for pacing, the show settles into a groove by the third episode. Conversations stretch to the right length. Conflicts don’t vanish in a cut. The writers give disagreements space to be messy without turning them into break-up cliffhangers. There’s a mid-season stretch where the romance feels electric even as doctor visits bracket the week, which is the sweet spot the series is chasing: ordinary life stitched around extraordinary stress.
Spanish TV has been mining grounded romance for a while—Netflix’s Smiley and Valeria took different swings at modern love, one cozier, one splashier. Love You to Death sits closer to the former while flirting with the body-blow honesty of films like The Big Sick. It isn’t as spiky or formally adventurous as those comparisons, but it thrives on the same belief: intimacy is built in quiet acts, then stress-tested by things no one chooses.
The soundtrack leans into mood without elbowing you in the ribs. Don’t expect needle-drop flexes every five minutes. When a song arrives, it colors a scene rather than hijacking it. A quiet tune under Saint John’s Eve, a guitar line threading through a walk home after a diagnosis—the choices support rather than announce themselves.
Acting across the ensemble is steady. Parents arrive bearing casseroles and unsolicited advice, friends toggle between gallows humor and genuine worry, and the medical staff get to be human rather than exposition machines. There’s a single-scene receptionist who steals a laugh with deadpan timing, and a doctor whose bedside manner is so practical it loops back to kind.
The Apple TV+ piece of this matters. The platform has staked a claim on premium dramedies that feel handmade—Ted Lasso for optimism, Shrinking for grief with punchlines. Pushing into Spanish originals with a romance that refuses to flinch at illness fits that brand. It also signals a bet that audiences will follow love stories across languages if the emotions read clean and the craft stays sharp. Subtitles don’t blunt banter when the rhythms are right.
There are smart production choices. Scenes rarely isolate the couple from the city for long. They’re in pharmacies, on sidewalks, in stairwells, wedged into waiting rooms—public spaces that squeeze private conversations. That constant press keeps the relationship from turning into a sealed terrarium where nothing gets in or out. Life interrupts. That’s the point.
The series also understands the difference between cute and cloying. It lets a romantic gesture be small and sincere—a plant repotted on a balcony, a ride to an early appointment, a shared superstition on solstice night—rather than staging a serenade under a hospital window. In a show where hope is always in the room with fear, smaller reads as truer.
Where it falls short, it falls short consistently. The underwritten pre-crisis versions of Raúl and Marta flatten the promised contrast between “wild” and “cautious.” The comedy stumbles when it reaches for stock bits instead of behavior-driven humor. And Marta’s interiority never gets the same detail as Raúl’s steadying presence. None of these break the spell, but they do keep the series from hitting the emotional heights its premise dangles.
Still, the central question—can you build something fragile while the ground shakes?—lands. The show doesn’t try to trick you with twisty plotting. It asks you to sit with two people as they choose each other on days when choosing anything feels impossible. When it stays with that, when it lets silence hold for a beat longer than comfort allows, it finds the beating heart it’s chasing.
Who is this for? If you want a laugh-track fantasy, look elsewhere. If you’re up for a romance that treats doctor’s appointments like calendar clutter and still makes room for dumb jokes about coffee orders, you’re in the right place. The Spanish texture isn’t garnish; it’s backbone. And the optimism isn’t naive; it’s work.
- You’ll vibe with it if grounded love stories like Normal People or Smiley worked for you and you don’t mind sharper stakes.
- You might bounce off it if you need deep-dive medical realism or a meet-cute every ten minutes.
- It’s a good couple’s watch if one of you wants heart and the other wants humor that doesn’t dodge pain.
The last thing worth saying is the simplest: the show believes love is not a cure, but it is a reason. That’s a risky thesis for a rom-com built on illness and surprise parenthood. It earns it more often than it misses—thanks to lived-in chemistry, a textured sense of place, and a willingness to let tenderness be as loud as fear.
