Entering through the Porta dos Fundos : The Changing Landscape of Brazilian Television Fiction

Abstract

Brazil is both a leading television producer in the Global South and home to TV Globo, one of the largest and most commercially successful networks in the world. Indeed, for nearly fifty years of its sixty-five year history, TV Globo and its standardized production of extremely popular telenovelas have largely come to characterize Brazilian television fiction as a whole. In this article, I situate the meteoric rise of the independent production company and YouTube sensation, Porta dos Fundos, within the broader context of TV Globo’s declining audience share and the wide-ranging effects of the Pay Television Law (2011). In doing so, I argue that Porta dos Fundos’s audiovisual production for the Internet and prime-time television serves as an illustrative case for understanding the interrelated ways in which recent policy, new distribution platforms, emerging independent production companies, and an influx of locally produced content are helping to shape the changing landscape of Brazilian television fiction as it transitions out of a six-decade-long network era.