Stream It Or Skip It: ‘How To Win The Lottery’ on Netflix, a drama about how employeed of a Mexican lottery tried to steal a jackpot

The new Netflix series How To Win The Lottery is based on a real lottery heist in Mexico, where lottery employees and contractors schemed to pre-tape a drawing in 2012, run out and picked the winning numbers, then splice in the pre-tape during the live broadcast. While the perpetrators were caught, it was still an audacious plan, and one that’s perfect for the heist drama genre.

Opening Shot: A man walks into a shuttered restaurant and tells four people sitting at a table, “Today is the day. Our day.”

The Gist:  We see the televised drawing of Mexico’s “Melate” lottery on January 22, 2012. The jackpot is 160 million pesos (about $8.5 million). but we also see the drawing for that night, with closeups of the balls and other machinery that would shoot the chosen balls out.

“Three months before the fraud.” José Luis Conejera (Alberto Guerra) is watching his teenage daughter Karen (Jesusa Ochoa) winning the go-kart race she’s in. He’s told by Mauricio Legoretta (Andrés Almeida), a former racing rival, that he may want someone with her talent on his racing team.

José Luis works for the Melate lottery, and he’s coming in on a Sunday for a special 30th anniversary drawing, hosted by Lina (Majo Vargas), the usual host of the drawings. Also giving a speech is Tarto (Christian Tappan), the director general of Pronósticos para la Asistencia Pública, the government agency overseeing the lottery. Tarto is more concerned with advancing politically than his actual job, and pumps José Luis to get him tickets to a magician his wife likes.

When José Luis finds out from Mauricio that it’s going to cost 6 million pesos (about $325,000) for Karen to join his team (she’s a risk because she’s a girl), he’s determined to come up with the money. Karen’s mother (and José Luis’s fiancée) Laura (Ana Brenda Contreras) tells him not to get her hopes up.

But José Luis comes up with an idea to reconfigure the lottery’s sponsorships so that its proceeds support girls’ sports, including Karen’s racing career. But when Tarto cancels the contracts under a cloud of corruption, José Luis — who actually plays the lottery because of his love of numbers and statistics — decides he needs to rig it in his favor.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? How To Win The Lottery (original title: Me late que si) is pretty much a heist drama, along the lines of Money Heist. For other lottery-related hijinks, might we suggest Jerry And Marge Go Large, a 2022 movie starring Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening about a Michigan couple who figure out how to game the lottery?

Our Take: Even after the first episode, we’re not sure how the plan is going to play out in this fictionalized version of the lottery heist. The pre-tape option we described above seems to be the simplest one, especially because the people participating — José Luis, Lena and production staff Mario (Jero Medina), Gilberto (Aldo Escalante) and Charly (Luis Alberti) — are all involved in the televised drawing. But it definitely is a different kind of heist than figuring out how to break into a vault or steal a piece of art.

We were a bit confused at the sequence of events that led José Luis to “steal the golden goose,” as he says when he comes to his epiphany about the heist plan. We think the way we described it above, with José Luis securing proceeds from the lottery to go to support his daughter’s racing career, is correct, but the machinations of the politics of how Pronósticos fits into Mexico’s governmental structure and just how corrupt Tarto is was unclear.

That may not matter all that much, though, as we watch José Luis get the others involved and hatch the plan, then execute it and try not to get caught. Like we said, it’s not like we see lottery-scamming heists all the time, so at the very least seeing it play out will be interesting.

Performance Worth Watching: Alberto Guerra projects the proper leadership vibes as José Luis, who was injured in a racing accident when he was younger and really wants his daughter to succeed where he didn’t.

Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: The aforementioned scene where José Luis lies awake in bed and comes up with the idea to steal from the lottery.

Sleeper Star: Ana Brenda Contreras’ character Laura isn’t going to be the usual spouse who discourages the main character’s big plans; she’s going to encourage him to stick it to the man (specifically the corrupt-as-hell Tarto). She’s even understanding when he gives her VIP seats for her favorite magician to his boss.

Most Pilot-y Line: “You get used to dealing with rats all the time,” says Katy (Paloma Petra), the lottery’s legal counsel, when speaking to José Luis about Tarto and why she doesn’t report him for his thievery.

Our Call: STREAM IT. How To Win The Lottery may go by the standard beats of a heist drama, but at least the heist is something we haven’t seen before, and that makes the show one we want to watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.