Triptych (Tríada) is a Mexican mystery thriller series, which is based on a real-life event. The series is directed by Leonardo D’Antoni & Alba Gil, and the teleplay is written by Leticia López Margalli. The story is brought to the screen by cinematographers Alejandro Chávez and Josué Eber Morales.
The cast of the series includes Maite Perroni in the titular role, along with David Chocarro, Flavio Medina, Nuria Bages, Ofelia Medina, Ana Layevska, Claudia Lobo, Aldo Gallardo and Daniella Valdez. It has 8 episodes in total with a runtime of about 42-48 minutes.
Which Real-Life Story Triptych is Based On?
The show also referred to an experiment done in the 1960s which was only revealed in the 80s, about a set of identical triplet brothers. They are actually Edward Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran on whom a documentary has been made in 2018. Three Identical Strangers, directed by Tim Wardle uses archival footage and interviews to explore their strange story and how the brothers came to meet each other.
They were born on 12 July 1961 to a teenage single mother who actually gave birth to quadruplets, but one of them died during childbirth, leaving the three brothers. It was decided to put the children up for adoption by Louise Wise Adoption Agency. But the agency staffed by psychiatrists Viola W. Bernard and Peter B. Neubauer intentionally placed them with three families of different parenting styles and economic levels.
One boy was adopted by a blue-collar family, one middle-class, and one affluent family. It also involved periodic visits and evaluations of the boys, the full intent of which was never explained to the adoptive parents. For most of their childhood, they grew up normally without them or their adoptive parents ever knowing about the other two boys.
What they could not foresee is that at the age of 19, these three young men would meet by chance at the university and become very close. Robert Shafran discovered that he had a twin brother when he arrived on the campus of a Sullivan County Community College in New York and was constantly greeted by students and staff who incorrectly recognized him as Eddy Galland.
The two eventually met and, finding out both had been adopted, quickly concluded that they were twins. This unique event made it to the newspapers across the US and months later, the third twin David Kellman reached out to them, whose resemblance and matching adoption circumstances indicated that the three were actually identical triplets.
Despite having been brought up in different families and backgrounds, they displayed an uncanny number of shared habits. All liked the same films, smoked the same cigarettes and had been wrestlers at college. Their story became so popular that they appeared on talk shows and even had cameo roles in Madonna’s 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan and eventually opened their own restaurant, called Triplets.
However, no matter how identical the triplets be the general differences between the three men become apparent, over time. All three had struggled with mental health problems for years, and eventually, Edward Galland took his own life in 1995.
The Mexican series seem to take inspiration from most of their characteristics, like showing Aleida’s demise right at the start and then becoming the precursor for the other two to come together. However, the series also included some more elements like having visions of each other and feeling the same things etc, which are completely fictional and not related to the actual triplets.
Nor was there a villain like Dr Julia who did the experiment for some personal sinister goal. Rather it was a study to determine the role of nature compared to the nurture that one gets from their parents and surroundings. While the experiment still falls into the wrong practices area but it was quite rampant at that time. The study suggests that in their case, DNA does look like a powerful determinant of human destiny as they were quite similar, but how they were raised became more predominant in later years which drove them apart.
Triptych is currently streaming on Netflix.
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