Glória

Pedro Lopes's Glória launched on Netflix in November 2021 as Portugal's first-ever Netflix-original series. The series won Best Series or Telefilm and Best Actor in Fiction (Miguel Nunes) at the 2021 Sophia Awards from the Portuguese Film Academy. The production was widely covered as a watershed for Portuguese television's international reach, particularly as the first major-budget Portuguese-language streaming series to find broad international audiences across Brazil and Portuguese-diaspora markets.

1968 Portugal, the late-Salazar period. João Vidal (Miguel Nunes), a young Portuguese engineer from a politically-connected Lisbon family, is sent to work at the Glória do Ribatejo broadcasting station, a small village in central Portugal that hosts a powerful American shortwave-radio antenna farm operated by Radio Free Europe to broadcast into the Eastern Bloc. There, João is secretly recruited as a KGB asset and finds himself caught between the Salazar regime, the Americans operating the station, the local village population, and his own ideological development.

Lopes's commitment to historical-procedural specificity (the actual Radio Free Europe Glória do Ribatejo facility, the period-Portuguese rural geography, the actual Cold War spy-tradecraft of late-1960s Iberia) produced a register that few earlier Portuguese-language productions had attempted. Adriano Luz, Joana Ribeiro, and Carolina Amaral anchor the supporting ensemble. The series's reception in Portugal extended a longer continuing debate about how the country's Salazar period is remembered and represented.