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Cien años de soledad, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, is one of the many classic novels that has long been viewed as unadaptable into a visual format. Over the past decade or so, however, something strange has been happening with all these “unadaptable” masterpieces: they keep getting adapted.
Whether it’s Apple TV+ taking a pass at Isaac Asimov’s heady sci-fi tome Foundation or Prime Video making sense of J.R.R. Tolkien’s dry Lord of the Rings appendices with The Rings of Power, the streaming era of television has proven time and time again that where there’s server space, there’s a way. Not all of these adaptations have been home runs, mind you (and I’ll let the reader work out which of those two previously referenced TV shows I consider a miss), but the fact that they exist at all is a small miracle all the same. For better or worse, we’re living in the golden era of making the impossible possible onscreen. Now, Netflix has reached another level in this genre with its brilliant TV adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez’s beloved 1967 book was considered unadaptable not merely because of its scale (in fact, it’s considerably smaller than something like the Foundation series or The Lord of the Rings) but because of its depth and splendor. With One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez creates nothing less than an entire nation’s unique founding myth from a modern perspective. The novel follows 100 years of the Buendía family as they pursue solitude and meaning in Macondo, a town that paterfamilias José Arcadio himself founded in the northern expanses of Colombia.
As Macondo grows, so too do the Buendías, often in an unpredictable manner. Aided by Márquez’ deployment of magical realism, odd supernatural events are commonplace for the Buendía family. At one point, when her life’s journey feels complete, a young member of the Buendía clan floats off into the heavens never to be seen again. Her family gets back to work without her. Through it all, Macondo is touched by the real life 19th and 20th century history of Colombia, becoming a battleground for a civil war between conservatives and liberals and falling victim to an exploitative banana conglomerate.
It’s a lot. And as its title promises, there is indeed 100 years of it. Anyone who has stumbled across a copy of the book in a bookstore (or was thankfully forced to read it as part of their education) can tell you why it avoided adaptation for so long. For years, Márquez steadfastly refused to sell the rights to his book, believing that no film could capture the full scope of it. He was right to do so. What Márquez couldn’t have anticipated, however, is that another medium would soon prove to be a natural fit for his sprawling epic.
Márquez died in April 2014, just as the media landscape was changing significantly. Thanks to the rise of Netflix and comparable streaming services, visual storytelling no longer came along with the capitalistic restraints of auditorium space in movie theaters or full-season episode counts for TV shows. In theory, that technological flexibility allows for a story to become whatever it needs to be: whether that be a traditional two-hour movie, a familiar TV procedural, or any combination that presents a single coherent narrative in chapters.
Of course, the reality of streaming hasn’t always lived up to the promise of it. Rather than exploiting the diverse formatting potential, streaming algorithms have increasingly locked them into distinct patterns. Perhaps you’ve observed that every Netflix documentary venture has arbitrarily become a docuseries with precisely three episodes each. Similarly, other streaming services have arbitrarily picked an episode count for dramas (eight for Prime Video titles and 10 or 13 for Hulu offerings) and stuck with them. None of this is to mention the frustrating phenomenon of the careless 3 a.m. ET release times that rob properties of any sense of excitement.
But even when streaming is at its algorithmic worst, it carries with it the potential of becoming home to a story that would otherwise be homeless. And that appears to be precisely what has happened with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Not only is this two-season, 16-episode series a technically and creatively-stunning achievement, it’s hard to imagine how it could have existed within any other context.
There is no version of a One Hundred Years of Solitude movie that works. Any amount of cuts for time to Márquez’ masterwork would be criminal. Similarly, a more conventional miniseries presentation on a network would prove fruitless as well. Márquez’ text is wonderfully resistant to sensible timelines and narratives. Time speeds up or slows down as needed in Macondo, with the final pages of the novel feeling as thought they occur in an instant. A 16-episode streaming title that operates both episodically and serially has significant more wiggle room to make such a feeling of temporal displacement work.
Of course, none of streaming’s advantages would matter if Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude weren’t equal parts technically proficient and respectful of Márquez’ original vision. Thankfully, this title is both. The series was filmed in collaboration with the writer’s family, who sold Netflix the rights in 2019. It was shot exclusively in Colombia, with Colombian actors, and in Spanish. The events of the series hew as closely to the novel as possible, which is not always the right move for an adaptation but is unquestionably the only route to take with this one.
As an adaptation of a beloved, yet somewhat inscrutable text, One Hundred Years of Solitude is unlikely to be a big hit for Netflix – though it is funny to imagine an unsuspecting subscriber’s autoplay continuing into the show after The Great British Baking Show: Holidays wraps. And indeed Netflix may end up losing money on the venture, depending on how they measure views against new subscriptions. But those are merely the boring financial bottom line concerns that helped turn streaming into mass of gray content sludge in the first place.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a good TV show. Its real value to the culture is a little more complex than just that though. The series is an expensive televisual museum exhibit for one of the Western world’s most important novels. The real miracle of Macondo isn’t that people sometimes float away, it’s that a streaming service put away its balance sheets and line graphs long enough to let a decadent and delicate piece of art slip through. If it hadn’t, One Hundred Years of Solitude couldn’t have lived anywhere else.
All eight episodes of One Hundred Years of Solitude season 1 are available to stream on Netflix now. Season 2 has been filmed but does not yet have a release date.
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