Parents' Guide to

Vida

TV Starz Drama 2018
Vida Poster Image

Common Sense Media Review

Joyce Slaton By Joyce Slaton , based on child development research. How do we rate?

age 16+

Sisters return to East L.A. in unique, tender drama.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 16+?

Any Positive Content?

Parent and Kid Reviews

age 18+

Based on 3 parent reviews

age 18+

Soft core porn

Latinos are the largest minority group in America, and are vastly underrepresented in media - which is why I was so excited when I heard about this show. What a BUMMER. The constant nudity and explicit sex scenes here make Game of Thrones look like a Disney Junior show. They detracted from the story, chipping away at it instead of adding credibility , making it feel more like soft core porn. I couldn’t make it past the first three episodes - super disappointing.
age 18+

Disturbing and unwholesome

This entire series is only skin deep pun all meanings apply, it’s sexually depravity in the series is in edifying and not pleasing, the story line attempts to manipulate emotions all while failing to puncture the skin past an annoying flesh wound!

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (3 ):
Kids say (2 ):

Engrossing and very cool, this drama's interesting setting -- a rapidly gentrifying lower-income Latin neighborhood in East L.A. -- gives it a unique sense of place. Not that Emma and Lyn appreciate it, at least at first. Emma, whose always-in-place carmine-red lipstick is an emblem for her put-together life, has a heavy job with a demanding boss in Chicaco; Lyn's been chasing a bohemian life in San Francisco, with a gringo boyfriend who likes her enough to invest in her line of Aztec lotions. Both of them are surprised to find themselves back home again, quickly embroiled in the neighborhood politics they became a part of as soon as they inherited their mom's building (which is half-filled with undocumented immigrants, Lyn tells us in Vida's first episode).

But while in lesser shows the people in the neighborhood would be types mouthing slogans, these residents quickly emerge as real, complex people -- hot-tempered young Mari (Chelsea Rendon), who's fighting her neighborhood's gentrification in YouTube videos and on the streets, Vidalia's widow, (played sympathetically by non-binary actor Anzoategui), so bereft at her wife's passing that she screams silently in the bathtub in one scene. Emma and Lyn may have tried to escape their pasts. But their lives are woven into the neighborhood -- there's no escape. Not that anyone, even conflicted Emma, would want to get far from this fascinating and complex show.

TV Details

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