THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Endless and anodyne dramas unwound on the Globo screens.  Most of them were about conflicts over sex and money in immensely wealthy white families living in huge apartments overlooking Rio, which was the Globo city.  Actors flounced into and stormed out of vast carpeted living rooms, collapsed or clinched on huge ivory Naugahyde sofas, quivered with emotion in close-up as they clutched a telephone receiver to their cleavage. 

*

Individuals whose ratings fell were written out of the story overnight and new faces brought in.  Fulminant brain tumors and car crashes and departures for the exterior were matched by returns from the dead – memory loss, the wrong body, whatever.  The better a soap did, the longer it survived and the most completely it lost any form or meaning beyond the tiny peaks before each commercial break.

Robb/Brazil, 2003