Community Squad (Spanish: División Palermo) is an Argentine television series created by Santiago Korovsky. Produced by K&S Films and distributed by Netflix, the series centers around a group of people who represent social minorities and are hired to form a neighbourhood protection guard.
The series criticizes tokenism in organizations through a screenplay that resignifies offensive humor to place judgment on companies and governments that discriminate against minorities.
The title of the series is taken from the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Palermo. In September 2024, it was announced as a nominee for the 52nd International Emmy Awards.[1] It finally won the award in November of the same year.[2]
Premise
A marketing campaign to clean up the image of the metropolitan police security forces creates a division of the Urban Guard composed of minorities. The recruiters (Subiotto and Hendler, the latter with a prosthetic arm) select a trans woman (Licciardi), a girl in a wheelchair (Gamboa), a blind man (Bogarín), an elderly deaf man (Marticorena), a dwarf (Cuevas), a Bolivian immigrant (Condori Sangalli) and the protagonist Felipe Rosenfeld (Korovsky), because he is Jewish.[3]
Santiago García of Infobae wrote: ‘The series knows how to find a way to laugh with the minorities without disrespecting them. That humour that people no longer dare to make or that can often lead to someone being cancelled. There is something healthy and luminous in being able to recover those jokes about things that affect us and that we live with on a daily basis. The real integration is that everyone can be part of the comedy. And most importantly, it's a really funny comedy’.[4]
Mikel Zorrilla of Espinof highlighted ‘[the] ability [of the series] to play with different archetypes that in another time would have served as the basis for jokes that did not go beyond the offensive -and the particular ability of the comedian in question to put his personal stamp on them’.[5]
Alejandro Modarelli, from Página/12, says that División Palermo poses ‘a social and cultural debate on freedom of speech’ in whose plot the Urban Guard is ‘made up of freaks hired in the neoliberal city as cosmetic instruments of the actual repressive policies’. The writer points out the intention of reflecting ‘the astuteness of the right wing politicians when they claim to be liberal, in its eagerness to hide difference under an export carpet or to instrument it, uncritically, as objects of consumption in the cultural markets’.[6]
Accolades
Community Squad received 20 nominations for the Silver Condor, the Argentine most important awards for films and television series. It won 7 of them, including "Best Comedy and/or Musical Series", "Best Director" and "Best Original Screenplay".[7]
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