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This book focuses on these changes through the creation, production, distribution, and consumption of a selection of television and Internet fiction, exploring the new mediascape that has taken root in Brazil since 2011. The objective is not to predict what that mediascape will be in the coming decades but to shed light on the emergence and the consequences of the post-2011 mediascape as a particular conjuncture. Ultimately, I argue that the ongoing transition from the nearly five-decade, TV Globo–dominated Network Era (1968–2011) to the increasingly competitive and fragmented post-2011 mediascape has given way to fundamental changes to the economic models, modes of production, producers, distribution windows, and consumption that have largely defined the Brazilian mediascape since the late 1960s. Such changes, I contend, also have major implications for the symbolic construction of the national social imaginary.

The present chapter begins by delving deeper into the Brazilian mediascape during the period between 1990 and 2011, revealing the early appearance of developments that challenged TV Globo’s audience shares over the two decades. This first part of the chapter sets the stage for the subsequent emergence of Porta dos Fundos, a recently formed independent production company and YouTube sensation. The remainder of the chapter explores the Pay-TV Law and the post-2011 mediascape through an analysis of Porta dos Fundos’s formation, founders, partnerships, and multimedia production.

This chapter expands on the structural analyses of earlier chapters by emphasizing the interrelatedness of developments occurring within the post-2011 mediascape and a broader theme: blackness in two contemporary Brazilian serial comedies: Mister Brau (Mr. Brown) and O Grande Gonzalez (The Great Gonzalez). The analysis of the two series’ distinct portrayals of blackness embodies an argument in favor of studies of representation that include fictional works of television outside of or in addition to TV Globo’s telenovelas. More specifically, it is a call for scholars to consider the varied matters of representation within the context of the structural shifts occurring during the post-2011 mediascape, accounting for how such shifts have played (or perhaps not) a central role in expanding production beyond the hegemonic confines of TV Globo’s vertical production model, resulting in the emergence of new voices and the possibility for more critical contemplations of race and other pressing social issues.

Chapter 3 utilizes TV Globo telenovelas (serial melodramas) featuring Camila Pitanga in order to illustrate how racialization relies on the framing of sexuality and consumerism. With widespread domestic and international consumption, these telenovelas represent dominant metanarratives of race, gender, sexuality, and class. The telenovelas represent larger racial projects of whitening populations or containing blackness through nonreproductive sexual labor. With an analysis of Belíssima (2005), the chapter outlines the morena archetype—a mixed woman who can be uplifted out of blackness and into whiteness if expectations of consumerism, purity, marriage, and reproductive labor are met. Differentiated from the morena, the mulata in Paraíso Tropical (2007) acts as a nexus of racial eroticism and desire. Both telenovelas refashion mixing, whitening, and racial democracy discourses in the 2000s.

Although more changes will certainly arise as the transformations to the Brazilian mediascape continue to take hold, it is clear that the confluence of legislative, technological, economic, and creative factors during the post-2011 context have given way to the most competitive mediascape in the history of Brazil. This particular moment represents a snapshot of Brazil, where the increasingly diverse field of television and Internet fiction is altering the relationships between distributor and producer and producer and viewer, and where a hegemonic force like Globo struggles to maintain and reproduce its audiences in the face of a number of subnational, transnational, and global movements, organizations, and technologies. In short, in the new Brazilian mediascape, while Globo competes with national and international pay-television channels, YouTube, and Netflix and while telenovelas compete with series, both local and foreign, more Brazilians in more parts of Brazil are faced with more symbolic portrayals of the nation than ever before. The result is a Brazil reframed by the small screens.