'Selena: The Series': Jennifer Lopez or Christian Serratos, who played the Queen of Tejano music better?
Spoilers for 'Selena: The Series'
If you're a fan of Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla, then you know her story for the most part. Thinking of how it was portrayed, many fans of the singer will say that the 1997 film 'Selena' starring singer and actress Jennifer Lopez as the titular character rocked the entertainment world. Reports reveal that the movie brought in $11.6 million on its opening weekend at the box office. Although, Netflix's new release on the singer titled 'Selena: The Series' attempted to dish out a fresh and varied perspective on the singer's story, they mostly left her individuality out of it. 'The Walking Dead' and 'Twilight' actress Christian Serratos played 2020 Selena Quintanilla in the Netflix series and while we say that the script didn't do the cast justice, we also have to say that once you watch JLo as the Tejano dynamite, it's over, there's no one better.
Serratos is a different Selena to put it best. She looks well in the efforts at how they allowed her to slip into the singer's role, she's probably at times part of the best scenes in the series and seems very natural in her delivery. Lopez was electric in her role all those years ago and just like her, Serrato too added a bit of her into her dialogue delivery. While Lopez's performance catapulted her career, we don't think that Serratos's performance falls on that same spectrum. It's safe to say though that Serratos wasn't given work up to her potential - the script was lazy at times, focusing on the struggles of the family than on the singer's struggle alone. It was as if we were not to expect the series to be about the name in its title.
It may also be that since we've watched Lopez, we feel that there should be no other Selena. It's the curse of forever seeing that actor tied to a groundbreaking role. But, Serratos's Selena seems lost in her own story in the series. It was a milder delivery compared to Lopez's. According to Yahoo, Serratos was aware that she was coming after a few greats. “I am such a fan of what Jennifer did in the first film, I grew up watching that film, I knew that Jennifer's shoes were big, Selena’s shoes were big, and I was going to have to show up and do my job,” she had said.
When it came to Lopez, her casting for the role actually brought quite a bit of controversy because she was an American born to Puerto Rican parents, while Quintanilla was a native Texan and of Mexican descent. Moisés Zamora, the showrunner of 'Selena: The Series' said this to Insider about the controversy, "The story with Jennifer Lopez is that it was just a no brainer after she auditioned. She captured [Quintanilla's] essence. Now, I think she's loved. And she just does an incredible job [in the film] that hopefully, people got over it." Lopez did quite an iconic job in the movie that was only released two years after Selena Quintanilla was killed in 1995.
The dramatics were low on this one since it is a series, while a film only has so much time before it should give you a resolution to its climax. Serratos did a great job in portraying a different Selena, but it's simply the truth that she wasn't better than Lopez in 1997.
'Selena: The series' is now available to stream on Netflix.
