Nada Será Como Antes

Nothing will be as before - or Nothing Remains the Same - is a title both generic and unoriginal for a period plot that barely respects the very era portrayed: from 1946 through 1959. The scenario goes from the heyday of the radio era up to the beginnings of televised soap operas. Rio de Janeiro was then the capital of Brazil. The name of this fictitious station - TV Guanabara - strangely mimics a TV station that did existed in the 1960s - in fact, such station still exists today, although it is now entitled 'Band' - actually a fierce competitor of TV Globo, the latter being the producer of the program in question. As in almost all of Globo's fiction productions, there is a lot of social engineering here, ranging from gay kissing to interracial marriage, to condemnation of machismo and tolerance towards cuckoldry. The direction is academic and the visual treatment, as usual, based on an impressionist imitation of brown & white. But the most shocking thing was the video clip that crowned the end of the arrhythmical series: a flash-forward in the form of self-propaganda of 21st-century Globo, which unveiled the "prodigious" programming of half a century later: nothing but a brazen self- promotion of a channel that, among the richest media in the world, should hardly need so much self-boasting.