It had started as a joke. A meme on a forum had promised that the acting in the Mexican telenovela was so intense, it cured depression. Elias, suffering a brutal bout of post-graduation malaise, decided to test the hypothesis.

If you’ve ever fallen down the telenovela rabbit hole, you know the feeling. You find a classic like Corazón Indomable (the gripping story of Maricruz and Octavio), you get hooked on the drama, and then you hit a wall: the subtitles are either terrible, non-existent, or locked behind a geo-blocked paywall.