Imagine moving to tears looking at a written scene, directed and played by Maccio Capatonda: you would think you will find yourself in a dream, or in a parallel reality, in short in a corner of the multiverse where everything is on the other hand of how we know it.

Instead, the emotion is only one of the multiple emotions, together with others as joy, amazement and a thread of sadness, which we tried watching despair zone, the new TV series released with all its 6 episodes on Thursday 20 March on Prime Videos.

A “serious series” that Marcello Macchia, a real name of Maccio, wrote in a moment of crisis, a situation of creative difficulty from which the author-actor-termination came out giving life to a mature and solid autobiographical story, without betraying his own path and identity but opening his career to a new phase.

The plot without spoiler of despair zone

Everyone knows Maccio for Father Maronno and for his comic characters, but when he also engaged economically for the production of a new TV series, in reality Maccio crosses a phase of poor inspiration and creative emptiness, as also confesses in a broadcast of Radio 2 to Andrea Delogu.

Leaving Rai’s studies, Maccio is approached by a man, Professor Arnaldo Braggadocio (Giorgio Montanini), an experimental psychologist who offers him a shock therapy to find creativity.

Maccio talks about it with his partner Myriam (Francesca Inaudi), with the manager-friend Luca del Fuego Confortini and his girlfriend Laura (Camilla Filippi), and also with the friends Valerio Lardini, Edoardo Ferrario and Gianluca Fr. And in the end he decides to undertake the therapy path.

Which begins by spending a week pretending to be dying in a hospice for terminal patients, where he knows the nurse Valerio (Desiò) who becomes his accomplice.

And week by week, Braggadocio therapy to bring Maccio out of his comfort zone continues with increasingly difficult and extreme tests, putting in total discussion the entire existence of Marcello-Maccio, from the relationship with his parents to that with Myriam, from the sense of his art to that of his life.

But how beautiful the Maccio series is for the first videos

Looking at the trailer, which you find below, one might think that despair zone is “only” a kind of capotondca version of a concept already seen in life by Carlo, in which Verdone stages an autobiographical pseudo representation of themselves and his relationship with people, fans and famous friends.

But despair zone is another thing, it is such a surprising and original series that projects Maccio Capatonda in a new and higher dimension. The crisis mentioned by the series is true, Maccio himself spoke to us at Toray.it. Just as true are almost all the characters we are talking about, even when there are actors to play his girlfriend Myriam Lugarà or his quarrelsome parents (“I wanted to make them act directly, but they had quarreled and I have chosen two actors” confessed Maccio).

Maccio has really become recently vegetarian, his production house is truly the micidial, even Valerio Desiò actually is a friend of his (and helped write the series). And all this reality translates into a story in which the boundaries between fiction and true story have faded, but even more those of the gender between the classic comedy of Maccio and the authentic drama that since childhood tries to camouflage with the mask of comedy.

The final result is a TV series that obviously makes you laugh, often and tastefully, as we always expect from him, but also and above all a test of maturity for the Abruzzo artist, who with despair zone adds to his curriculum a dramatic vein, both from an authorial point of view and from the actor one, which in our opinion will mark a first and a final after in his career.

VOTE: 8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_2ay8ecypi