'Pantanal', the 'remake' of a soap opera that repeats the triumph in Brazil three decades later

The television sensation of the season in Brazil is undoubtedly the soap opera

, right now the most watched program with 36 million daily viewers.

It is a

, an updated adaptation of a soap opera that already triumphed on the screens of the most populous country in Latin America 32 years ago.

The plot is the same as in 1990, but the secret is in the details.

The new version includes important new features.

Now, macho attitudes have an answer, female nudes are less explicit, male sensuality is evident and, although the weekend barbecue is still a national institution in Brazil, one of the protagonists is vegan.

The most surprising of the success of

is that it has managed to hook, together with the old followers, a new adolescent and young public that never knew the original version of the vicissitudes of this saga about the Leoncios and the Marruá in a spectacular setting, the ecologically richest region of Brazil after from Amazon.

The Pantanal is an ecosystem located to the east of the Amazon.

He comes to be the poor brother of the largest tropical forest in the world.

It does not have its exuberance nor does it attract the same attention by far, but its biodiversity of fauna and flora is one of the richest in the world.

Landowner José Leoncio is a man embittered by the disappearance of his father and the flight of his wife two decades ago who is reunited with his son, raised in the city, in Rio de Janeiro.

The landowner lives in the Pantanal, a land fertile in legends such as one about the woman who turns into a jaguar, and the man who mutates into a snake.

It is the epicenter of an entanglement that includes all those ingredients that make soap operas no longer as central a part of Brazilian family life as before, but still attract huge audiences: passions, secrets, generational conflicts, betrayals...

Isabel Teixeira as Maria Bruaca in 'Pantanal'.

Premiered more than three months ago,

is broadcast during Globo's prime time slot, the historic Brazilian soap opera factory, at 9:00 p.m., just after the main nightly news.

It is the time of the adults, when the content includes subjects of greater voltage and shown in a more explicit way.

The daily soap opera in the afternoon is more modest (let's say it's designed so that grandmothers and grandchildren can watch it together) and the first of the night is aimed at teenagers.

Originally written by the screenwriter Benedito Ruy Barbosa, now in his nineties, the person in charge of updating the telenovela is his 34-year-old grandson Bruno Luperi.

A family relay that in Brazil is considered the most normal thing in the world.

The doctor in Brazilian television dramaturgy Mauro Alencar recently defined to the

newspaper the secret of the attractiveness of the

in 2022: “It is perfectly adapted to current times.

I mean, Luperi is retelling the classic story of his grandfather within the time and space of the 21st century”.

From the hand of 'Big Brother'

For Julia Dalavia, 24, one of the protagonists, who plays Guta, a modern and uninhibited girl, mentioned in

another key factor of success that has surprised many.

“All the characters are very dichotomous, they all have two sides: the tragic trait and their strengths, like Zé Leoncio, who has several problematic issues of machismo, but at the same time he is an honest, gentle guy, with character.

And that's human."

The soap operas, which are recorded as the episodes are broadcast, seek their space in an audiovisual panorama in which they reigned without a shadow for decades and that Netflix and the rest of the platforms have revolutionized in recent years.

The excellent audiences on classic television are accompanied by the wide repercussion of

in the universe of social networks, which in Brazil is immense.

Its contents are meme meat, they go viral and the actors have become influencers.

The success of the

has a particularly sweet flavor for the Globo group, which produced the original version in 1990, but let it slip away without ever broadcasting it.

It ended up reaching the public thanks to a rival channel, TV Machete, which took the glory when viewers got hooked on the story.

That's why this time he prepared the launch conscientiously, with his sights set on attracting Brazilians between the ages of 15 and 29, who are less hooked on the telenovela format than their elders.

The way to do it was

(BBB), the long-running

one of the few programs whose filming was not paralyzed by the pandemic.

trailer

It could be seen during an intermission of BBB and the first chapter was broadcast inside the house that for weeks starred in the nightly comments of Brazil on social networks.

It was an appetizer for many of those viewers who probably knew

from their mothers or grandmothers.

Television commentators emphasize that a soap opera had not reached such audiences for years, especially in the younger age group.

The vicissitudes of filming and the actors succeed in parallel to the broadcast of the chapters.

The actress who plays Guta told in the aforementioned interview the challenge of filming in the Pantanal ecosystem and surrounded by so many animals, such as the baby crocodile, who is convinced that it bit her butt and the toad that climbed on her arm while reading a book during a break.

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