The Colombian romantic dramedy Just Alice (Simplemente Alicia), created by Marta Betoldi and Esteban del Campo Bagu, opens with a spectacle so improbable it starts to feel metaphysical. The first sequence runs on pure velocity: Alicia Fernández (Verónica Orozco) fights Bogotá’s petty chaos to make it to her own wedding, dodging a tow, repairing a torn hem, and hopping onto a friend’s motorcycle. Matrimony meets urban entropy. The gag lands, and the premise starts to look like a thought experiment about order, chance, and desire.
The central situation surfaces immediately. Alicia hurries to marry Pablo (Sebastián Carvajal), an earnest community worker who once wore the collar. There is a complication. Her legal husband, Alejo (Michel Brown), a successful novelist, lives happily unaware of a second ceremony. The show builds its energy on this non-consensual bigamy and frames it with the polished language of a contemporary Latin American telenovela, where high passion sits with high-stakes humor. The stress comes from maintenance. Concealment becomes plot.
The Split Self and Affective Economics
Verónica Orozco plays Alicia as a figure split across appetites. Impulse appears, yet the performance leans toward calculation, like a ledger of feeling kept by someone with a deep fear of being left behind. The character studies feasibility before morality, as if intimacy could be managed through logistics. Call it romantic hyper-capitalism: emotional scarcity gets denied, returns get chased, and the market never closes.
Each marriage feeds a different register of the psyche. With Alejo, Alicia inhabits an intellectual contract, a muse arrangement in which she is inscribed directly into his work. Their attachment feels entrenched and a little tortured. With Pablo, she reaches for a gentler ethic of commitment, tied to service and a simple idealism. The chemistry Orozco finds with both actors keeps preferences unstable for the viewer. Indecision becomes a mirror of Alicia’s duplex heart, a two-room apartment where both tenants pay rent on time.
Susana (Constanza Camelo), Alicia’s closest friend, anchors the ensemble. She plays witness and chorus, tracking the fiasco from the curb. Her dry asides supply a moral barometer and an air valve, a necessary cooling system for a protagonist intent on self-combustion.
Cinéma Vérité of the Soap Opera
The production design and camera choices lift the material. Directors Catalina Hernández and Rafael Martínez favor intimate framing and a sleek finish, firmly aligned with the current streaming aesthetic. That refinement sits beside writing that embraces telenovela flourish. Feelings arrive at full volume, coincidences arrange themselves with baroque precision, and the score leans into the joke with cues that wink.
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The series knows its own absurdity. Alicia’s double life plays like procedural craft, complete with schedule triage, ring swaps, and alibi architecture staged as “domestic espionage” montages. The genre alloy gives the show buoyancy. Episodes move quickly, with each 40-minute chapter adding another calibrated jolt. A question of stamina emerges across a 19-episode first season. Near-miss melodrama requires constant escalation, and the risk of fatigue grows whenever the story must invent one more improbable detour to delay disclosure.
The Ethics of Double Commitment
Just Alice turns multiplicity in desire into a test case. Can comprehensive love live inside one bond, or does the self divide its needs across partnerships that answer different calls? The series floats a Romantic Hegelianism: contradiction produces knowledge. Two commitments collide, and the wreckage clarifies the terms of fidelity.
Bigamy and infidelity arrive without sermon. Alicia’s choices damage people, yet the framing reads them as a coping mechanism built on loss anxiety. The writing tracks the accounting rather than the lecture. Every kept secret generates emotional debt, and every promise accrues interest. Tension concentrates around an “Implosion Imperative.” The secret will end. The engine of the story studies timing and magnitude, the ticking clock and the blast radius of revelation. The show delivers guilty-pleasure heat and, at the same time, a layered cultural document on female desire and accountability.
Just Alice is a Colombian romantic dramedy that premiered on Netflix on November 5, 2025. The series centers on Alicia Fernández, a resourceful woman who finds herself secretly married to two different men: the acclaimed author Alejo, and the idealistic former priest Pablo. The show follows her increasingly chaotic attempts to juggle her double life and keep the two worlds—and two husbands—from colliding. The first season is structured for binge-watching with 19 episodes, each running approximately 40 minutes. It is available exclusively on the Netflix streaming platform.
Credits
Title: Just Alice (Original Title: Simplemente Alicia)
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: November 5, 2025
Running time: Approximately 40 minutes per episode ($\mathbf{19}$ episodes in the first season)
Director: Catalina Hernández, Rafael Martínez Moreno
Writers: Marta Betoldi, Esteban del Campo Bagu
Cast: Verónica Orozco, Sebastián Carvajal, Michel Brown, Constanza Camelo
The Review
Just Alice
This intensely kinetic dramedy succeeds at packaging an outrageous premise into a polished, modern streaming format. Just Alice is anchored by Verónica Orozco’s electric, nuanced performance and the genuinely sharp chemistry among the primary cast. It functions simultaneously as a bingeable soap and a compelling, morally ambiguous exploration of female desire, commitment, and the terror of abandonment. The extended episode count presents a major structural risk, threatening to dilute the high-stakes tension through narrative repetition. It is a complex, messy, and highly addictive watch.
PROS
- An electric and complex portrayal of a messy, mature heroine.
- The success of the premise is built on the believable, distinct romantic dynamics with both male leads.
- Successfully blends high-stakes romantic drama with elements of "domestic espionage" and dark comedy.
- Features polished, intimate cinematography that elevates the material beyond traditional soap opera.
- Provides fertile ground for exploring female desire, accountability, and the fear of solitude.
CONS
- The $mathbf{19}$ episode length risks plot exhaustion and the necessity of increasingly unbelievable narrative near-misses.
- The bigamy setup, however well-executed, may inherently frustrate viewers due to its sustained, willful deception.
- The refusal to judge the protagonist may alienate viewers seeking a clear moral reckoning.
