Pôr do Sol

In August 2021 RTP put a half-hour comedy in a summer slot and accidentally produced the Portuguese television event of the decade. Pôr do Sol was created by the actor Rui Melo, the writer Henrique Cardoso Dias and the director Manuel Pureza, and it is a parody of the domestic telenovela, executed with the straightest face imaginable. It went to Series Mania in Lille the following spring, in the comedy competition.

The Bourbon de Linhaça family run an estate near Santarém built on cherries and racehorses. There is a matriarch, a scheming brother, a stable hand with good bone structure, a long-lost daughter of contested parentage, and a great deal of shouting in doorways. Gabriela Barros plays the young woman at the centre of it; Rui Melo plays the family's most operatic member. The joke is entirely in the execution — the zooms, the organ stings, the freeze-frames on a raised eyebrow, the dialogue delivered as though every line were a season finale.

It drew 426,000 viewers on its opening night and became the most-watched thing RTP Play had ever carried, at a moment when the public broadcaster was widely assumed to have lost anyone under forty. The second season turns the satire on the series format itself. Portuguese comedy rarely travels, and this is the exception worth making: a parody so precisely calibrated to its target that it works even if you have never sat through the thing it is mocking.