Twenty copies of Liar Liar can ruin a marriage. Mariano is unconscious in a hospital bed when Nines discovers how badly he has mismanaged the family video store, yet Malena Alterio attacks the inventory list as though her husband bought every Jim Carrey VHS to spite her personally. Food for the children, she fumes. Bridges of Madison County. Twenty Liar Liars. Mariano cannot defend himself. The coma has one perk.
Set in Valladolid in 1998, Naughty Business gives Nines a fairly brutal promotion from dutiful housewife to owner of Dorothy, a video store buried in debt and losing customers to a shiny chain competitor. Irene Bohoyo and Carlos del Hoyo build the eight-episode comedy around an elegantly rude solution. The only tapes still making money are porn.
Nines goes to Mass. Her husband has handled the finances. Her domestic ambitions include acquiring a deep fryer that will stop croquette smoke colonizing the kitchen. She is hardly the expected pioneer of Valladolid’s adult entertainment market, which is precisely why the setup clicks. Then she studies the rental numbers. Morality meets bookkeeping. Bookkeeping wins.
What Valladolid Rents After Dark
The comedy gets its cleanest rhythm from watching Nines discover that her supposedly respectable neighbors are considerably hornier than advertised. Men sneak around the adult shelves. Women arrive curious, embarrassed, or armed with questions they cannot comfortably ask elsewhere. Nines initially imagines a clientele of deviants. Dorothy’s receipts suggest the deviants have excellent neighborhood coverage.
Alterio plays this shift through tiny changes in reaction. Early on, sexual language freezes Nines’s face into a mask of Catholic alarm. Later, a strange request makes her pause, calculate, and consider stock. The transformation works because Nines never stops being practical. She learns about porn the same way another shopkeeper might learn which biscuit sells best on Thursdays.
Her home life gives that education teeth. One early sex scene has a crucifix rattling against the wall while Mariano approaches marital intimacy with frantic commitment and Nines lies beneath him with the enthusiasm of someone renewing a driving licence. The joke is broad. Alterio’s blankness makes it sting.
The series keeps returning to Nines’s fantasies and hallucinations, letting her repressed desire interrupt the respectable life she has built. Some are ridiculous. Some make her visibly afraid of her own curiosity. The show understands a useful comic principle here: embarrassment lasts longer when the person experiencing it cannot leave the room.
Dorothy gradually becomes a gathering point for women, especially once screenings turn into discussions of adult films and then into conversations about their own sex lives. Their husbands have the bar, cards, and brandy. The women get VHS tapes and analysis. Civilization has been built on less.
Malena Alterio Knows Where the Joke Is
Alterio carries Naughty Business without turning Nines into a provincial simpleton waiting for enlightenment. The distinction matters. Nines may know very little about pornography, yet she recognizes a viable market faster than Mariano ever recognized a bad purchasing decision. Again: twenty copies.
Her comic timing is particularly good when the script lets Nines process information before responding. The fraction of silence between hearing something filthy and deciding she has a business-related follow-up question becomes its own recurring gag. Alterio lets rigidity loosen one notch at a time.
Celia Morán’s Chon provides a useful counter-rhythm. Chon has the relaxed manner of somebody who has already survived every conversation Nines is terrified to begin, and her foul mouth often reaches the punchline before Nines has located the subject. Álvaro Mel’s Agus, the timid cinephile, gets caught between them. His friction with Chon gives Dorothy the feel of a genuine workplace, where philosophical disputes about cinema can be interrupted by whatever is happening near the adult rack.
The series also expands the shop’s clientele across ages, bodies, and sexual identities. Irene, played by Ana Mencía, is a lesbian woman with Down syndrome whose sexuality is treated as part of her character’s life rather than a ceremonial representation lesson.
Another thread follows a porn performer moving toward directing adult material from a female perspective. Here the show has an actual dramatic question about who controls sexual imagery and who gets reduced by it. Television occasionally discovers representation and behaves like it has invented electricity. Naughty Business simply invites everyone into the video store.
Please Rewind Your Sexual Repression
The show’s raunchiest formal trick arrives in its porn parody openings. The horseback telenovela sequence starts like some sweeping melodrama, complete with accusations of incest and an absurd turn toward sex as revenge. The editing waits just long enough before revealing that characters are watching the scene. Porn logic gets roughly nine seconds to pretend it has human logic.
The title sequence pulls a similar prank by matching traditional Spanish pasodoble sounds with softcore imagery. Directors Ana Jaurrieta, Laura M. Campos, and Núria Gago repeatedly borrow familiar genre grammar and dirty it up. Mariano even gets a Spaghetti Western-style sequence late in the season, because apparently comas and terrible inventory management were insufficient humiliation.
The 1998 setting earns its place in the story through the physical awkwardness of VHS. There is no private browser tab. A customer has to enter Dorothy, choose a tape, carry it to the counter, and make eye contact with another human being. Every rental becomes a small social negotiation. The nearby chain store supplies commercial pressure, while scrambled late-night television and period music keep the town perched between old habits and changing tastes.
The season is shakier when it leaves individual situations and tries to tighten the larger business plot. Encarni receives less development than her introduction promises, and the fifth episode includes a lengthy speech about cinema that explains ideas the women’s film discussions have already made perfectly clear.
The writers occasionally trust a monologue after a scene has done the job. Television loves paperwork. Still, Naughty Business repeatedly finds sharp comic scenes by putting private desire in a public shop. Valladolid can condemn Dorothy all it likes. The rental records are right there.
The Spanish comedy series Naughty Business premiered its complete first season on April 25, 2026. Audiences can watch all eight episodes of the debut season streaming exclusively on Prime Video with an active membership. The humorous plot follows a traditional housewife who must adapt when her husband falls into a coma, leading her to save their bankrupt family video store by transforming it into the neighborhood’s very first adult film shop.
Where to Watch Naughty Business Online
Full Credits
Title: Naughty Business
Distributor: Prime Video
Release date: April 25, 2026
Rating: TV-MA
Running time: 26–35 minutes per episode
Director: Andrea Jaurrieta, Laura M. Campos, Núria Gago
Writers: Carlos del Hoyo, Irene Bohoyo
Producers and Executive Producers: Amazon Studios Production Team
Cast: Malena Alterio, Celia Morán, Álvaro Mel, José Luis García Pérez, Raquel Pérez, Chani Martín, Celia de Molina, Esperanza de la Encarnación, Aina Picarolo, Daniela Blume
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Prime Video Cinematography Crew
Editors: Amazon Studios Editorial Team
Composer: Prime Video Sound Department
The Review
Naughty Business
Naughty Business turns a bankrupt video store into a surprisingly sharp comedy about shame, money, and female desire. Malena Alterio gives Nines enough stubborn practicality to keep the premise grounded, especially when she realizes porn rentals understand Valladolid better than its respectable citizens do. The season sometimes explains jokes and ideas that its best scenes have already delivered, and a few supporting characters drift off the shelf. Still, Dorothy is a fine place to spend eight episodes. Just maybe avoid the family section.
PROS
- Malena Alterio's comic precision
- Sharp 1998 setting
- Strong sexual hypocrisy satire
- Memorable porn parody openings
- Dorothy's lively ensemble
CONS
- Uneven season structure
- Some underwritten side characters
- Occasional explanatory speeches
- Store plot loses momentum
