'Killing a Bear': Movistar Plus Turns a Poisoned Pyrenean Bear Into TV Crime

By Daniel Okafor

The victim in Movistar Plus's next big crime series is a Pyrenean brown bear named Cachou, poisoned with anti-freeze in April 2020 during Spain's COVID confinement. The show is "Killing a Bear" ("Matar a un oso"), from Spain's largest pay-TV/SVOD operator Movistar Plus and Arte France, and it dramatizes a real case: the first criminal investigation in Spain, and Europe, into the slaughter of an animal.

The timing is not accidental. Crime represented 27% of scripted TV orders globally in the first half of 2026, estimates Ampere Analysis — the single most commissioned genre, and 61% of the No. 1 series among the world's biggest players, per figures cited at October's Mipcom in Cannes. Original crime is the Holy Grail. A bear will do as a body.

Who made it, and why it matters

"Killing a Bear" is created by Jorge and Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo at Kubik, owned by Studio TF1 — the brothers behind 2011's "Crematorio," the first high-profile premium series made in Spain, produced by Mod Producciones for Canal+ España. Jorge lead-directs and co-writes.

Movistar Plus's track record gives the project weight: Series Mania 2025 top prize winner "Querer," International Emmy-nominated "Anatomy of a Moment," and 2023's "La Mesías," the first showcase for Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, writer-directors of Academy Award contender "La Bola Negra." All three were bought by or co-produced with Arte France, making the pair one of Europe's most fertile axes for artistically ambitious series about the current state of Spain and Europe.

What's the plot?

A murder is committed in the Val d'Aran. The suspects: 262 inhabitants of an anti-bear internet chat room, led by Zacaríes Farga, a high-ranking local politician from one of four families controlling the valley. Farga is the Environment Councillor, administering funds to protect bears reintroduced to the central High Pyrenees from Slovenia in 1997 under a European Union initiative — while also running the Anti-Bears chat room. In a flashback, he boasts at a party about one good way to kill a bear: getting it to ingest anti-freeze. A container spotted in his garage makes him a prime suspect.

Each episode adopts a different point of view. Episode 1 follows Neus Amat, a Rural Police Officer and farmer's daughter from Pallars Sobirà who sees both sides. Episode 2 belongs to Lola Barrera (Nora Navas), a Barcelona judge who instigates the criminal investigation and wire-taps suspects. She admits to loving the landscapes but "hating" its people: "They're like stuck in the last century," she tells her daughter. When they first meet, Farga delivers a veiled threat, clenching his fist: "This is a valley: You can't get in or out of here."

Episode 3 belongs to Cachou himself — combining a real bear with digital effects from Ollín VFX — attacking and killing two horses and sheep like any adolescent testing his power, becoming the valley's public enemy No. 1. The victim, it turns out, was also a killer.

A prologue set in 1932, shot in a 4:3 box format, shows Farga's grandfather shooting a bear that killed his sheep, then feted as a village hero — until a Barcelona landlord confiscates his America rifle, because clients pay good money to hunt bears. For grandson Zacaríes, killing bears is ancestral legacy.

How did they control the tone?

Tone was the key, Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo said at a presentation at Madrid's Iberseries & Platino Industria. "There are a lot of strange, near surrealistic situations which could tip the series into comedy, which would give a sense of not caring about the death of the bear," he said. "But if we were too dramatic, it wouldn't have been realistic. So we attempted to maintain a naturalistic tone."

The brothers shot over seven weeks in September and October last year, in unusual sun — deliberately, says Alberto Sánchez-Cabezudo, "to offset what could come across as too dark a drama." Locations serve argument, not postcard: when Barrera rounds a bend high above the valley, the camera trucks near a precipice to reveal the valley thousands of feet below, an enclosed world.

The series has "the narrative propulsion of Agatha Christie," per its makers' framing, but it is sluiced — their word — by the contradictions of a divided, warring present. Alexandre Piel, Arte France's co-head of fiction, connected the structure to that ambition at Iberseries: "We're living in a world of constant present time. Social networks have got rid of history and our memory. By having episodes which intertwine characters, you come to understand them, their sense of identity and where they come from in a far more nuanced manner."

Movistar Plus executive producer Susana Herreras gave the commercial verdict: "'Killing a Bear' trapped us: It is a thriller with a very good story and strong auteurist voices, and such strong characters, which is a perfect mix for us."

Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo put it most directly: "'Killing a Bear' is born from the necessity of understanding the world's current polarization and the fable of bear Cachou seemed to us to be the best way to sum it up." In a genre drowning in interchangeable corpses, a poisoned bear with a nation's grudges attached may be the freshest suspect list on the market.