The Trial

"The Trial" (El Juicio) is an eight-episode Mexican legal drama that landed on Prime Video on September 11, 2026, directed by a rotating trio: Roberto Sneider, Belén Macías, and Jorge Michel Grau. Eugenio Derbez plays Miguel, a middle-class father whose teenage daughter Andrea (Karla Gaytán) is assaulted by the son of a powerful businessman. Pedro Alonso, the Money Heist guy, shows up on the other side of the aisle as the family's fixer. The early episodes set the terms: a case that should be simple, a system that isn't, and a father who has no idea how far the other side is willing to go to bury it. That's the whole first-act shape. Everything else is watching Derbez find out what kind of movie he's actually in.

Derbez, all the way down. He's spent thirty years being the funniest man in any given Spanish-language room, and he walks in here having deleted the comedian entirely. No mugging, no beats reaching for a laugh, just a guy watching his life get processed by an institution that doesn't care. Alonso plays the antagonist as boredom rather than menace, which is scarier. Sneider directs the courtroom scenes with a hand-held closeness that keeps you inside Miguel's shoulder rather than up in the gallery, and Macías handles the domestic material with the same restraint. The writing knows the specific texture of Mexican bureaucratic slow-walking, the kind of stalling that isn't corruption exactly, just architecture. That's what gives it teeth.

Eight episodes is generous for what's essentially one case, and the middle stretch feels it. A couple of subplots exist mostly to keep supporting cast on payroll. If you've watched a lot of prestige assault-trial television, you'll recognize the structure from about the twenty-minute mark and can probably guess most of the moves. There's also a scoring problem, some heavy-handed strings telling you how to feel in scenes that were already doing the work. And Derbez's costars, Alonso aside, sometimes get outclassed in two-handers with him, which flattens what should be tension.

People who liked "The Night Of" for the procedural grind more than the whodunit, or "Anatomy of a Scandal" for the class-warfare texture. Anyone who's been curious whether Derbez had this in him. Subtitle-tolerant viewers who want a legal drama that isn't set in a Manhattan glass tower. Quits in episode two: anyone hoping for twist-a-week plotting, anyone who watches Derbez to laugh, anyone who wants their justice-system dramas to end tidy.

It's a WORTH IT because the case for watching is a performance and a place, not a plot. The show has real things to say about class, impunity, and how power protects itself, and it says them almost entirely through Derbez's face and the physical space of the courts. That's the Lecture Test passed. The writing lets the drama argue instead of arguing itself. It's not reinventing the form, and it's a couple episodes too long, but the craft is honest and the lead is a revelation. That's enough.