Women Wearing Shoulder Pads
HBO Max
If you’re looking for something different, way different, to watch this week, you might want to flip on HBO Max to witness something highly unusual. That would be the new show Women Wearing Shoulder Pads, which currently has a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Women Wearing Shoulder Pads may sound like some sort of period piece about women in the workplace. Instead, it’s a stop-motion puppet comedy on Adult Swim. It’s the first Spanish-language on the service and it’s well, just watch the trailer:
Actually, forget that, watch the first episode, which HBO Max has made free on YouTube in order to get viewers hooked:
If you can’t spend those 12 minutes to watch it yet, the synopsis is as follows:
The vibe is very Robot Chicken, albeit as a full series, not a clip show. The series is from Gonzalo Cordova, who most notably was a writer on 14 episodes of Tuca and Bertie, the famously cancelled Netflix series that was eventually picked up by Adult Swim. After two more seasons it was cancelled on Adult Swim as well, but at least managed three in total. Now, Cordova is on Women Wearing Shoulder Pads here.
Here’s Cordova speaking to Indiewire about his project:
“I grew up hearing all these family stories about Ecuador, and about things that happened in my family, and they were all so melodramatic and over the top and exaggerated,” Cordova said. “For me, it had a connection to his world, to the way his films in the ‘80s are very colorful and over the top. And I wanted to see if I could put pluck a character from his world, and kind of put it in that world and see what would happen.”
He goes on to say that production is challenging, given that there are 60 miniatures with multiple costume changes to manage in stop-motion, which is obviously an art form we do not see all that often these days. And this one is more complicated than most, said Roy Ambriz, an animator:
“Usually when you see stop-motion productions, there is one set with two characters and with the same clothing. But for this production, we needed to create a lot of different sets,” Roy Ambriz told IndieWire. “Some sets were used only for one shot or for one scene, but that creates and helps the melodrama. They’re real people working, but they are miniatures, they are toys.”
Women Wearing Shoulder Pads is a fascinating series and will air first on Adult Swim, then on HBO Max the next day. Right now, just two have been released.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/08/21/watch-hbo-maxs-new-100-rotten-tomatoes-show-for-free-here/
