Electric Rose: A Series That Tries to Escape Clichés, Succeeding Only Halfway

Rosa Valera is thirty years old, lives in an anonymous apartment, has a relationship she doesn't seem too involved in, a passion for music, and a knack for getting into trouble. She has built an impenetrable shell, with which she keeps the world around her at a safe distance. Newly transferred to the Witness Protection Unit, she is assigned Cocìss – son of the Incantalupo clan boss: designer shoes, a cocky attitude, and the awareness that he has limited time if he doesn't make the right decisions.

The protagonist of Electric Rose almost immediately realizes she is in grave danger when she senses that the police sent to pick up the informant are not there to protect him, but rather to silence him. An impulsive act transforms her from agent to fugitive, and she finds herself on the run like a wanted criminal with Cocìss, both now targets of Camorra clans and an institution that prefers not to leave potentially inconvenient witnesses alive.

Here and There Without a Moment's Respite

Thus begins the journey across Italy, from Naples to Trentino, aboard a car and with no one to trust. This is the leitmotif of Electric Rose - On the Run with the Enemy, a Sky Original miniseries in six episodes directed by Davide Marengo and loosely inspired by Giampaolo Simi's bestselling novel of the same name, published by Sellerio back in 2007.

The director described it as a "crime comedy on the road," and we can't disagree, in a production that, though imperfect, tries to break free from the established norms of local genre productions. We are not, in fact, facing the usual dark and didactic Italian crime drama; quite the opposite. The series instead focuses on a distinctly pop aesthetic that aims to appeal to an international audience, although some narrative choices reminiscent of national-popular themes and post-Gomorrah risk acting in the opposite direction to the one seemingly proclaimed.

But the staging still has a vague cinematic feel, with the camera always on the protagonists, solid handling of action dynamics, and a thematic soundtrack accompanying the increasingly turbulent events. The screenplay, also leveraging the source material, works particularly well when it tries to avoid genre traps: no one-dimensional villains, no mechanical video game progression, no final cathartic release, and a platonic bond between the two protagonists that is less forced and predictable than usual, but rather based on dichotomous misunderstandings.

Full throttle

The series doesn't believe in pre-established order, or rather, it doesn't believe that institutions are necessarily on the side of truth, weaving a thread of subplots where betrayals are commonplace and hypothetical boogeymen hide within the police itself. The real narrative stake is not to discover who is lying, but to understand what will remain of Rosa and Cocìss at the end of the season, how much their forced companionship will actually manage to transform them in one way or another.

In this game of opposites, the cast's contribution is fundamental. Maria Chiara Giannetta, after years of Italian serials that have confirmed her versatility – from Blanca to Don Matteo – here tackles a character built with effectiveness and harmony. And complementary is Francesco Di Napoli – already seen, among others, in Piranhas (2019) – who brings to Cocìss that nervous and contradictory physicality of a boy who grew up too fast in a wrong world. The chemistry between the two, despite its ups and downs, is the true engine of the series, with a good supporting cast playing the various secondary characters, good or bad as they may be.