Ruído

Bruno Nogueira is one of the few Portuguese comedians whose television work arrives as an event, and each new series looks nothing like the last: Odisseia, Último a Sair and Princípio, Meio e Fim all tried a different shape. Ruído premiered on RTP1 on 7 May 2025, eight half-hour episodes on Wednesday nights, written by Nogueira with Carlos Coutinho Vilhena, Frederico Pombares and Luís Araújo. It earned a nomination for Project of the Year in the humour category at the 2026 Globos de Ouro.

The premise is a law. In a parallel Portugal, laughing in public, or showing any kind of joy, has been made a crime, and a group of actors and writers has started staging comedy in a clandestine theatre for audiences willing to take the risk. Nogueira, Rita Cabaço, Albano Jerónimo and Gabriela Barros play versions of themselves, with Gonçalo Waddington alongside, and the series cuts between the suspicious world outside and the sketches performed for the crowd inside. The frame gives the sketches a charge they would lack on their own. A routine about a parents' evening lands differently when the people laughing at it could be arrested for doing so.

Portuguese viewers read the dystopia as a comment on the pressures the country's comedians already work under. A second season followed on RTP1 in October 2026. Its opener drew complaints to the media regulator, the ERC, and a Catholic association objected to a sketch filmed in a church, which is roughly the reaction the series is about. For anyone outside Portugal it is a fine introduction to the actors who carry the country's screen comedy, with more freedom than prime-time television usually allows.