In this book, Eli Carter explores the ways in which the movement away from historically popular telenovelas toward new television and internet series is creating dramatic shifts in how Brazil imagines itself as a nation, especially within the context of an increasingly connected global mediascape. For more than half a century, South America’s largest over-the-air network, TV Globo, produced long-form melodramatic serials that cultivated the notion of the urban, upper-middle-class white Brazilian. Carter looks at how the expansion of internet access, the popularity of web series, the rise of independent production companies, and new legislation not only challenged TV Globo’s market domination but also began to change the face of Brazil’s growing audiovisual landscape. Combining sociohistorical, economic, and legal contextualization with close readings of audiovisual productions, Carter argues that a fragmented media has opened the door to new voices and narratives that represent a more diverse Brazilian identity. A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez

The Brazilian television industry is one of the most productive and commercially successful in the world. At the forefront of this industry is TV Globo and its production of standardized telenovelas, which millions of Brazilians and viewers from over 130 countries watch nightly. Eli Lee Carter examines the field of television production by focusing on the work of one of Brazil's greatest living directors, Luiz Fernando Carvalho. Through an emphasis on Carvalho's thirty-plus year career working for TV Globo, his unique mode of production, and his development of a singular aesthetic as a reaction to the dominant telenovela genre, Carter sheds new light on Brazilian television's history, its current state, and where it is going—as new legislation and technology push it increasingly toward a post-network era.

This book analyzes the relationship between media power and democratization in transitional societies based on a case study about TV Globo, Brazil's largest media group.

This book examines Brazil's ever-popular telenovelas--a televised mini-series that use recent news issues to help frame its plots. This work increases in importance as more audiences in Brazil rely on diversifying news sources for key decision-making information; and media systems tussle with information presentation and democratic behaviors.

An incisive analysis of contemporary crime film in Brazil, this book focuses on how movies in this genre represent masculinity and how their messages connect to twenty-first-century sociopolitical issues. Jeremy Lehnen argues that these films promote an agenda in support of the nation’s recent swing toward authoritarianism that culminated in the 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Lehnen examines the integral role of masculinity in several archetypal crime films, most of which foreground urban violence, including Cidade de Deus, Quase Dois Irmãos, Tropa de Elite, O Homem do Ano, and O Doutrinador. Within these films, Lehnen finds representations that criminalize the poor, marginalized male; emasculate the civilian middle-class male intellectual, casting him as unable to respond to crime; and portray state security as the only power able to stem increasing crime rates. Drawing on insights from masculinity studies, Lehnen contends that Brazilian crime films are ideologically charged mediums that assert and normalize the presence of the neo-authoritarian male within society. This book demonstrates how gendered scripts can become widely accepted by audiences and contribute to very real power structures beyond the sphere of cinema. A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.