‘The Boss – Season 4’ Review: Argentina’s Most Cynical Series Ends on a Repetitive Note

Fifteen years ago, with The Man Next Door, directors Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat locked into a narrative engine that has served them—commercially, at least—almost flawlessly. The blueprint is simple but requires a certain cunning: build two adversaries who obsessively devote themselves to making each other’s lives miserable. It’s less a plot than a system, a worldview. Life is a permanent battle, and the only way to win is to be sharper, craftier, more ruthless than the other guy. Anything else doesn’t count. The world isn’t for the weak.

Across four seasons, The Boss became the purest expression of that system, anchored by a slippery, deeply controversial protagonist who survives endless attempts to trip him up by being dirtier, quicker, and more deceitful than anyone trying to rein in his shady dealings. Eliseo is no role model: corrupt, opportunistic, a compulsive liar who never does anything without an ulterior motive. Every relationship he forms follows that logic. And if someone—neighbor, rival, or supposed authority—gets in his way, they’ll pay for it.

By the end of the previous season, Eliseo Basurto (Guillermo Francella) had launched his own company, taken on the building superintendents’ union, and—thanks to his talent for manipulation and playing the victim—won both in court and in the court of public opinion. He’d become such an unlikely icon that even the president (Arturo Puig) summons him to the Casa Rosada, seeking him out as an advisor. That strange, opportunistic relationship with the head of state becomes one of the main threads in these final episodes.

Beyond that, the fourth season sprawls into multiple subplots that, at least initially, allow Eliseo to keep landing on his feet: he makes a fortune in a new venture, takes over a deceased neighbor’s apartment, and continues ruling over the same brutalist building as its all-powerful superintendent. Until lawyer Matías Zambrano (Gabriel Goity) launches an elaborate plan to finally get rid of him. The question is the usual one: can anyone actually beat Eliseo, or will he once again twist every losing situation into a win?

The structure, as always, feels repetitive—at times downright tedious—with secondary characters drifting in and out, quickly forgotten (with one exception involving the welcome return of Daniel Aráoz). At one point, thanks to his presidential access, Eliseo seems to wield more power outside the building—offering bizarre “solutions” to national problems—than within it. But anyone who’s watched even half an episode knows better than to count him out.

By now, the writing struggles to come up with new tricks or even fresh micro-aggressions; Francella’s performance, once sharply calibrated, starts to feel over-rehearsed, repeating familiar beats; and the whole mechanism reveals itself as mechanical and worn out, built on little more than pitting Eliseo against people as bad—or worse—than he is. The series limps to its conclusion drained, with few ideas left beyond poking at “sensitive” or progressive targets through its trademark acidic humor.

If there’s a moment that genuinely lands—arguably the only one—it arrives almost by accident. The reappearance of Luis Brandoni as the homeless man known as “El Polaco,” crossing paths with Eliseo at a critical juncture, brings a fleeting sense of real emotion. Not so much because of what happens on screen, but because of what it carries from real life: knowing these were among the late actor’s final scenes gives the moment an unexpected weight.

Outside of that, everything remains as harsh and systematic as ever. One can’t help but imagine how exhausting it must be to devote an entire filmography—save for minor exceptions—to crafting repellent characters locked in endless cycles of mutual cruelty. Even the idea of writing stories whose sole engine is watching terrible people battle each other starts to feel suffocating. And the sense lingers that the system itself—as projects like Homo Argentum already suggested—is running on fumes.

The cynicism and misanthropy that define The Boss—and much of Cohn and Duprat’s work—end up feeling bleak not just as entertainment, but as a philosophy. When Basurto reaches his lowest point and it briefly seems like he might discover a more generous, more humane way of seeing the world, it’s hard to believe it will stick. You can already sense the next twist coming, the next con waiting around the corner, ready to restore that grim, familiar normalcy.