Álex Pina, the architect of a heist that refuses to end

The most-watched non-English series in Netflix’s history was rescued from a Spanish broadcast network that had already given up on it. That is the lopsided origin every Álex Pina interview keeps circling back to: a heist drama with a small audience on Antena 3, picked up by Netflix, recut into bingeable half-hour episodes, dressed in red overalls and Dalí masks, and rolled out as a global emergency. Pina has been candid about the gap. He wrote the show; the streamer made it land. The decade since has been spent figuring out what to do with the franchise that decision created — and, more recently, whether anything else he writes can escape it.

He came to fiction from journalism. Born in Pamplona to a Navarrese family in the late 1960s, Pina spent his early twenties in regional newsrooms — El Diario Vasco, Diario de Mallorca, the Europa Press agency — before crossing over to scripted television at Videomedia in 1993 and joining Globomedia in 1996. The Globomedia years were a long apprenticeship in mainstream Spanish prime-time: Periodistas, Los Serrano, the kind of family-hour writing rooms where a screenwriter learns to land an act break on a national audience twice a week.

The first hint of what he would later become arrived inside that system. Los hombres de Paco, El Barco, El Príncipe — half-jovial, half-noir ensembles that ran for years on Antena 3 and Telecinco — taught him the rhythm of long-form serialized stories. Then in 2015, with Vis a Vis, he and a small group of writers (his long-standing creative partner Esther Martínez Lobato among them) built the first prototype of what would later become the brand: a closed-space ensemble, criminals as the moral centre, women carrying the heat, and a willingness to break the fourth wall when the form needed it.

Pina left Globomedia at the end of 2016 and founded his own production company, Vancouver Media. Its first show, La Casa de Papel, premiered on Antena 3 in May 2017 to an audience that did not match the scale of the production. Netflix bought it, re-cut the original two seasons into shorter episodes, and the series turned into a phenomenon almost as soon as the global catalogue absorbed it. The 2018 International Emmy for Best Drama — the first ever awarded to a Spanish-language series — was less a celebration than a confirmation that the show had already escaped the country that made it.

That escape came with a tension Pina has never quite resolved on screen. He has said publicly that he rewrote the ending of La Casa de Papel thirty-three times before letting it go, and the closing seasons divided the critics who had loved the first two. The Volume 5 finale read, to many, as the Netflix machine working harder than the writers’ room. The same machine has continued to expand the universe — Berlin in 2023, talk of more police-focused spin-offs to come — and the question of whether the franchise has anything left to say is no longer rhetorical. Billionaires’ Bunker, released in 2025 under the Spanish title El refugio atómico, was Pina’s stated attempt to step outside the formula. Netflix cancelled it after one season. The pivot has not yet worked.

What is working, on the evidence of the past two years, is the empire-management side of the job. Vancouver Media now runs as Netflix’s primary Spanish-language scripted partner; its slate moves between heist, prison, sex-work satire and bunker thriller without changing house style. Berlin’s second season, retitled Berlín y la dama del armiño — Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine — arrives on Netflix on May 15, 2026: eight episodes set in Seville around a forged da Vinci heist, again co-created with Esther Martínez Lobato. Pina has framed it as the universe’s first sustained attempt to live without the Professor at its centre. If it lands, the franchise has a new spine. If it does not, the next argument will be about whether the audience is asking for more or asking for the end.

The screenwriter who once described himself as a journalist who happened to fall into fiction has now spent ten years building, defending, and quietly questioning the largest non-English property in streaming. The Casa de Papel offered him every escape from Spanish prime-time he could have wanted; it also became the thing he now has to keep arguing with. What he writes next — Berlin’s answer, or whatever follows it — is the conversation that decides whether the empire he built outlives the heist that started it.

Tags: directors, Spain, thrillers