Over the last forty years, soap operas - primetime series exhibited six times a week, targeting an imagined predominately female audience, but watched, in their most popular phase by a 40% male audience - have become a privileged niche for the interplay of interpretations of Brazil. A complex web of relationships involves the authoritarian military agenda (1964-1984); advertisers agenda; and left-wing screenwriters, actors and directors coming from cinema and theater. Filmed as they go on air, soap operas captured and expressed at least three different interpretations of a country undergoing rapid structural changes. The principal aesthetic conventions of the genre fueled rival broadcasting companies to propose three views of the country. From 1969 on, in tune with a Brazil envisioned for the future, Rede Globo's soaps revolved around the dramas accompanying urbanization, social differences, the liberalization of conjugal relationships, and consumerism. In 1990, Manchete TV proposed the re-interpretation of the country centered on the exotic landscapes found in the Pantanal region, in the "heart of Brazil". In 2006, following film approach to poverty and violence, Record network introduces the favela scenario and the threats represented by drug trafficking.
Television; Soap opera; Social thought; Nation; Brazil