The Premise
"The Truthers" (original title: Los Creyentes) is a Spanish Netflix thriller built around Ruth (Stéphanie Magnin), a young woman living in Berlin who gets pulled back to her small Galician hometown when her mother dies. Waiting for her: her estranged father Manuel, played by José Coronado, a man who has spent years down a rabbit hole about pharmaceutical companies and the people he thinks are hiding what really happened. The setup is a grieving daughter, a father nobody in town wants to be near, and a death that Manuel refuses to accept at face value. It's a slow-burn small-town mystery with a psychological-drama engine underneath.
The Case For
Coronado is the whole reason to press play. He plays Manuel with a low, tired intensity that keeps you honestly uncertain whether you're watching a wronged man or a dangerous one, and that ambiguity is the show's actual subject. Magnin holds her own opposite him, playing Ruth as someone who left for a reason and is remembering all of them in real time. The Galician setting does a lot of quiet work too, all damp coastline and grey stone, the kind of town where everyone knows everyone's business and nobody says it out loud. When the show leans into the character study, on what conspiracy thinking does to a family across years, it's genuinely uneasy in a way most Netflix thrillers aren't.
The Case Against
The mystery machinery is thin. The procedural side, the clues and the questioning and the who-knew-what, doesn't have the muscle to carry the psychological weight the show clearly wants. Pacing drags in the middle stretch. If you came for a plotty whodunit with clean reveals, you'll be tapping your phone by the second hour. It also gestures at big ideas about misinformation and internet-poisoned parents without ever really digging in, so the thematic payoff is softer than the setup promises.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
Sticks with it: people who liked the moody family-secret side of Broadchurch, the slow Galician dread of Rapa, or anything where the mystery is really about a damaged relationship. If a two-hander between a wary daughter and a father you can't read sounds like a good night, you're the audience. Bounces in episode two: anyone hoping for Money Heist energy, twist-per-episode plotting, or a tidy conspiracy that resolves. Also a rough sit for anyone who needs the mystery to actually be smarter than the characters solving it.
The Ruling
BACKGROUND TV is the honest read. Coronado is doing genuine work and the atmosphere is real, but the writing doesn't rise to meet him. The show has a strong premise and a strong lead performance stapled to a mystery plot that keeps stalling out, and it never quite decides whether it wants to be a character piece about a broken family or a thriller about a small-town cover-up, so it's a slightly underpowered version of both. On the Lecture Test it passes clean: the conspiracy material is handled through Manuel, as behavior and cost, not as a speech. Nobody's being sermonized at. It's just a mid thriller with a great actor in it. Put it on while you fold laundry, glance up whenever Coronado's on screen, and you'll get exactly what it's offering.
Sources: