A thief, a nurse, a waiter, a toll-booth cashier, a tennis coach and a man cornered by an office Christmas party — six strangers who never meet, who share nothing except the one thing that should be impossible to share: a face. In Unexpected Loves, that face belongs to Martín Bossi, and the whole architecture of the series is built so you can never quite forget it. Marcos Carnevale has assembled an anthology of six separate love stories and cast a single actor as all six leads, which turns a format usually praised for its variety into something closer to an argument.
The argument is about performance. Bossi is, before anything else, the most recognizable impersonator Argentina has produced — a stage comic whose one-man shows are assembled from dozens of borrowed voices and faces. Handing him six original men to inhabit, not one of them a celebrity to imitate, is the real experiment here. The roles carry names that read like a comedian’s roster — Chori, Washington, Julio César, Bebe among them — and the pleasure Carnevale is counting on is a double one: the small romance playing out in front of you, and the performer taking himself apart and rebuilding underneath it.
That doubling has a specific national lineage. The transformist — the comic who contains multitudes, who can be a dozen people in an evening — is a durable figure in Argentine popular culture, and it is the instinct Bossi has traded on for years. What changes when he points it at invented men rather than famous ones is the stakes of the trick. Mimicry asks to be recognized; you measure it against the original. Invention asks to be believed. A burglar, a nurse, a toll-booth cashier have no original to check against, which means the performance has nowhere to hide and nothing to lean on but whether the man in front of you feels like a man at all.
The construction is strict. Each episode stands alone; the stories never cross, and there is no framing device stitching them into a larger plot, no shared universe waiting to be uncovered in a finale. What holds the six together is the recurring lead and a single recurring question — whether an unlikely pairing can outlast the situation that produced it. One episode turns a burglar loose in the home of a woman who has just been divorced. Another places a nurse in the position of reconnecting an elderly patient with the daughter he lost. A third follows a restaurant waiter pursuing a wealthier, older client; a fourth tangles a man in a workplace romance during the Christmas shift; a fifth grows a rapport between a toll-booth cashier and a driver who keeps returning; the last hands a tennis instructor a student he is not supposed to want.
Carnevale is the safest possible pair of hands for material this exposed. His cinema — Elsa y Fred, Corazón de León, Inseparables, Anita — is a body of work built on the reliable romantic beat, on warmth engineered rather than stumbled into. That control is precisely what keeps a project like this from sliding into a sketch reel. An anthology of Bossi impressions would be a variety hour; six short films that each have to function as an actual romance, shaped by a director who has spent a career making the feel-good machine run on time, is a different proposition entirely, and a harder one.
It is also where the danger sits. The risk with Carnevale has never been coldness; it is the opposite — that the warmth thickens into sentiment, that the cleverness of the conceit sands down into comfort. Early Argentine reviews have named that risk without much hesitation. The register can turn syrupy, and the anthology exposes a difficulty the format itself creates: explaining, six times over, why the women in these stories keep saying yes to men written as self-absorbed, evasive or a little foolish. When the same face returns as the object of six different desires, the show has to re-earn the audience’s belief that this particular man is worth wanting, from scratch, in every episode. That is the structural tax on the whole idea.
There is an audience contract underneath all of this, and it is unusually explicit. A viewer arrives already knowing Bossi, already carrying an affection built over years of stages and screens; the series spends that goodwill on purpose, asking the audience to accept him first as a burglar and then to forget the burglar and accept him as a nurse. The promise is six feel-good romances with a beloved comic lead. The gap that generates whatever meaning the show has is that the recurring face keeps tugging attention away from each romance and toward the performer’s transformation — so the thing being sold and the thing being watched are never quite the same, and the series seems to know it.
Read as a place in television history rather than a novelty, the show sits at an odd intersection. The anthology has had a prestige decade — self-contained installments, a rotating cast, a new world each hour. Unexpected Loves inverts the usual pleasure of that form. Instead of a fresh face each time, it offers the same face and rotates everything around it, which makes the format less a showcase of range across performers than a study of range within one. The variety is all internal. Whether that reads as discipline or as a stunt is the question every episode reopens.
The romantic register is its own test. A romance has to make wanting legible — it has to persuade you that two people belong in the same frame — and it has to manage that quickly when an episode runs only forty minutes. Stretched across six unrelated pairings, the demand turns relentless, and it lands almost entirely on one actor asked to keep meeting it in a fresh key each time. That is the tightrope the whole series walks: the same face, a different reason to believe in it, over and over.
None of this is happening outside the logic of the platform that bought it. Disney+ has been steadily building out its Latin-American originals, and a series fronted by a star with Bossi’s recognition, written and directed by a filmmaker with Carnevale’s commercial record, is exactly the kind of local anchor a streamer wants in that catalogue. The project even carries the marks of that calculus in its own history: shot in Buenos Aires well before it reached anyone’s screen, it was held back after the platform judged it short of its standards, and only now surfaces. A vehicle this dependent on a single performer is a bet, and the delay reads like a company deciding, twice, how much it trusted the bet.
What the format cannot resolve — and, to its credit, does not pretend to — is the doubt its own casting keeps raising. If one man can be loved in six different lives, under six different names, then what is actually being loved: the person, or a performance convincing enough to pass for one? Bossi has spent a career proving he can become anyone. Unexpected Loves quietly turns that gift into a question about romance itself, and then leaves it open.
Unexpected Loves — Amores inesperados in the original Spanish — premieres on Disney+ on 16 September 2026. It runs six episodes of roughly forty minutes, produced by LaFlia Contenidos and Non Stop, written and directed by Marcos Carnevale. Alongside Bossi, the cast includes Julieta Cardinali, Jorgelina Aruzzi, Eleonora Wexler and Betiana Blum.
Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)
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