I am not Cuban, and yet I used to watch this series fervently on our local PBS station in Puerto Rico. It was extremely funny, and a great deal of the credit, besides the excellent cast, belongs to Luis Santeiro. Given the comedy's format limitations (no dialog would be uttered in English without it being referenced, directly or indirectly, in Spanish, and vice versa), and given the obvious limitations of explaining a culture (in this case, Cuba's) within an American context through acting alone, Santeiro did an excellent job of synthesizing Cuban, American, and Cuban-American elements within a comic vehicle that could only bring you to the floor, laughing, and laughing hard. I'm unaware of the series' episodes being available in DVD format nowadays, but if you have a chance to see them, somehow, check these ones out: The episode where Joe, Steven Bauer's character, has an appendectomy (the African-American nurse is a riot, and so are the Peñas trying to sneak into Joe's room while his suffering room co-patient, a Jewish-American, has to endure them); the episode where Carmen and Pepe Peña end up drunk (and Pepe has to give her some rather hypocritical fatherly advice about the ills of alcohol); Carmen's crash while trying to get driving lessons from Mi Abuelo Driving School (and the entire family's day in court), and the episode where Adela's friend dies, therefore ruining Carmen's, Violeta's and Joe's party and dates. Velia Martinez was EXCELLENT as Adela (there's an episode where she has to do a live coffee advertisement right in the middle of a TV soap opera broadcast, and that vignette is a gem in itself), and so was Connie Ramirez as the sassy, sexy Violetica... to say little about the rest of the regular cast, which was equally good within their context.
One further word of advice: scrap the non-Bauer episodes towards the end of the series run (as well as the rather flat "Parque sí, Parqueo no" one... these are the few ones that force me to give the series a lower score), and try to watch all others in their entirety. Only in this series you'll ever see a Roman Catholic father trying to bless a house simultaneously while a santera evokes her spirits at some room elsewhere in the same house... and they accidentally end up facing each other.
This is a comedic gem of a series. I miss it dearly.
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