La Usurpadora: best telenovela ever, or so I remembered it

It's out there online, illegally; also on netflix 

When I was little, still living in Dominican Republic, my family waited every night for the hour or two of telenovelas. Assuming there was electricity, which there often wasn't. Among the telenovelas I half-watched in that time, none made as much of an impression as La Usurpadora (The Usurper, I'm pretty sure). 

The plot is cliched, or so I'm told even though I rarely see it. Paola Bracho is an evil rich lady married to a nice guy with two children, a serious older brother, a very religious adopted sister, two children from a previous marriage, and an alcoholic grandmother. Oh, and a struggling business. Paola gets bored of dealing with all the tedious family drama, so she pretends to be sick so she can travel outside of Mexico to see "specialists". In truth, she goes off with a "cousin" (lover) to Cancún, where she meets her double, the sweet maid Paulina. So she can go on travelling and cheating, Paola frames Paulina for jewelry theft, then promises not to press charges as long as Paulina takes her place in the Bracho household.

Most of the drama stems from watching Paulina deal with aftermath of Paola's over-the-top evil actions. She totally ignores her young stepchildren. She is cheating on Carlos Daniel with his sister's loser husband. She's spending way, way too much money while the family business flounders. She is sneaking cognac to Carlos Daniel's elderly grandmother so she can sleep/because she finds the old woman's drunken rants hilarious. She is also cheating with some random, rather dangerous Italian painter (who, by the way, has the crappiest nude painting of Paola ever in progress). As is common in lots of stories, Paola's evil is the most entertaining aspect of the entire thing.

If I was prone to armchair psychology, I'd say that Paola has dashes of histrionic personality disorder. She loves flashy clothes, jewelry, attention (sometimes from men who aren't all that impressive, see: the sister-in-law's douchey husband and that weird "painter"). And probably she's a bit of a psychopath too, since she has very little regard for the pain she causes to everyone around her. Everyone in the Bracho household is either scared of her (the servants), completely fooled by her (the husband, the grandmother, the twit brother-in-law), or extremely angry at her (the siblings). She's like the telenovela Darth Vader.

When I watched as a kid, I thought little beyond what I saw on the screen, but now I'm noticing a disturbing trend in this thing. The male characters can do no wrong, ever. The twit brother-in-law I described above? It's unclear if he has some kind of job. His wife seems to love him because . . . well, I don't know. He insults her, cheats on her with her brother's wife, and calls her an idiot if she ever makes any advances. Yet his wife never once considers leaving him. She blames Paola entirely for her husband's abuse and infidelity, and in reality the man is little more than an afterthought to Paola.

The situation with Carlos Daniel is not much better. Almost everyone agrees that Paola is Obviously Evil, yet no one blames him for allowing her to indulge his grandmother's alcoholism, ignore his children (even though they think of her as a mother because they're so young), or spending money as if the family isn't on the verge of bankruptcy. It's like everyone just accepts that Paola's hot woman powers render any man in miles incapable of thinking rationally. And I'm just . . . they're men, not cognitively impaired.

Regardless, I do like it. It's always a thrill to see what Paola-related nonsense Paulina has to deal with next, and if memory serves, there's a whole arc about Paola's return after Paulina has won the hearts of the Bracho household (there's an epic, melodramatic trial!). Since it's a serial novela that had five episodes per week, the pacing is not exactly stellar, but there's plenty of melodrama making up for it.