In Lockdown Brazil, Everyone Is Watching Big Brother
The long-running reality show has become an arena for the country’s culture wars, and a magnet for advertisers.
Greetings from the pandemic panopticon.
Courtesy of TV Globo
After a year battling worsening Covid-19, and with new variants on the loose, Brazilians still face bouts of confinement and outright lockdown. So what’s the pastime of preference for this homebound nation of 211 million? Watching other people in quarantine.
Televisions, computer monitors, smart phones — all are locked into Big Brother Brasil, the local franchise of the reality show that is internationally known, but whose fan base and buzz is perhaps nowhere greater than in Brazil. Two decades on, the local edition, featuring a group of strangers competing for cash and glory under one roof, is still something of a cultural contagion, with tens of millions of willingly afflicted viewers.