The man who predicted the big blackout in Spain: "I turned on the radio and kept thinking I'd already written this."

In the first episode of Blackout , the series that Movistar Plus+ premiered in 2022 , Spain is plunged into darkness by a solar storm, mobile phones stop working, the streets are filled with uncontrolled cars due to the ineffectiveness of the traffic lights, shops cannot cope... In one of its first scenes there is a conversation between the head of Emergencies, Luis Callejo, and his subordinate, Concha Delgado, while they observe a train accident that has occurred in Castellón: "Tomorrow is a holiday, people are going on a long weekend," he says as an argument to evaluate the acting.

Three years later, for a few hours, fiction became reality . All those situations were repeated this Monday in Spanish cities. Even the conversation could have been part of that reality, with a slight temporal variation. Tomorrow isn't a holiday in Spain, but Thursday will be. " This morning I was listening to the radio and I kept thinking that this is literally what I had written a few years ago ," explains Fran Araújo. The Galician was the script coordinator for that series and participated in the writing of three of its five episodes.

The blackout—the real one—caught him in Barcelona, ​​in the middle of a video call when, suddenly, the connection cut out and the power went out. "When those in Madrid told me it had happened to them too, I said, 'Holy crap, this can't be true.' Because that's exactly how the story would begin. The whole process you'd imagined, suddenly you see it materialize into events and people saying the same things you'd imagined without really knowing what they're talking about," Araújo explains.

Blackout was inspired by the podcast The Great Blackout, written by José Antonio Pérez Ledo and produced by Podium Podcast. Given the success of the audio format, it was adapted to audiovisual format, with Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Raúl Arévalo, Isa Campo, Alberto Rodríguez, and Isaki Lacuesta behind the cameras for each episode. Alberto Marini, Isabel Peña, Rafa Cobos, and Araújo himself wrote the scripts, which told their own stories and were not limited to the podcast.

To do so, its creators turned to experts in adverse weather events, such as solar storms, and to the various emergency services spread across the country with their protocols for these types of situations. "We mentioned it in the series: there's a 2% chance of something like this happening, which is the same percentage as a global pandemic ," Araújo points out.

The blackout explored in the series required more than two years of work to restore normality because the power grid nodes had been burned and, therefore, destroyed by the sharp surge in voltage. What happened yesterday in Spain was a power outage in that same power grid, and it had to be repaired within a period of between six and ten hours, according to the deadlines established by Red Eléctrica. In the series, in fact, the story was covered over several days, with its resulting episodes of violence. Especially in episodes 3 and 4, which focused on the defense of a residential area by its inhabitants and the situation in a rural area when urbanites began to arrive to take refuge there and find food. " I think we're not so crazy yet that things would have gotten out of hand so quickly in a few hours, but seeing the lines at the supermarkets ... In two days, things would have been more complicated," argues the screenwriter.

And he concludes this review of the blackout with the situation he experienced when the power went out. " I panicked, I went out into the street, and I saw everyone calm. I think all of us who dedicate ourselves to telling stories already have a fabulist and unhealthy mind that takes us to the worst possible places. I don't know, you experience everything more intensely," says the screenwriter, who is now awaiting the premiere of The Song , the series that revives the story of the singer Massiel. "You can rest assured, there's no catastrophe."

Luckily.