ASomething in the silence between one word and another that Kalil Filho said looking at the Excelsior TV cameras on that March 30, 1965 gave clues that he knew he was stepping into the heart of the story. “And here is the performance of tonight’s last melody. Fishnet. Elis Regina.” No one, apart from the hellish people of Beco das Garrafas, in Rio, knew Elis when the TV showed the country the singer full-length in front of the broadcaster’s orchestra. Fishnet She walked through laughter and drama until she reached an eruptive peak that made her arms twirl and her voice overflow. What was said until then in intellectual circles in the South Zone of Rio became global. Elis, the TV showed, was real.
Until then, Ed Sullivan, in the northern part of the hemisphere, had already materialized many people since the debut of his program The Ed Sullivan Show, on CBS in 1948. While Excelsior showed who Elis was, he brought five black brothers from Gary, Indiana to his stage. Ed was a torpedo. On the first day he had the Beatles as an attraction, making them take off on North American soil, his program was seen by 73 million people. One fake news In good humor, he preached that the feat even reduced crime rates on the streets of the United States. “The thieves were watching us too,” said Beatle George Harrison later, with grace. But that day, looking at 6-year-old Michael Jackson, Sullivan was bewildered. As soon as the number was over, he called them over to say hello and said: “Take a good look at him,” he said, pointing to the smallest boy, Michael, who was wearing a pink hat: “This boy is going far.”
Music and television, when united, raised to the tenth power the audio euphoria initiated by the Radio Era the moment it gave it an image. Before divorcing, a phenomenon that has been observed in recent years, with the extinction of relevant musical programs on TV and fewer and fewer spaces for music in those that already exist, the parties involved gained high tangible values and many intangible investments. in a two-way game. The artist came with the prestige and the broadcaster with the space. Thus, the channel gained an audience and the artist tripled his fee. In the case of more discreet productions, new musicians guaranteed visibility and relevance. In the most ambitious, some of the first pop stars emerged after the Luiz Gonzaga era. Secos & Molhados, Elis Regina, Wilson Simonal, Jorge Ben, Ronnie Von, Roberto Carlos and all of Jovem Guarda, Rita Lee and all of Tropicália, the festivals and all of MPB, Belchior and all the people from Ceará. Everything was revealed on some TV station.
The break between TV and music has left an inexplicable vacuum and, even in the hazy times of streaming, the feeling is that someone, besides the artists, is losing a lot from it. Globo ended the auditorium reality show The Voice, in December 2023, after doubling its revenue in 2019 and pocketing 115 million reais. He ended it, he said, because there were better things to come. On the other hand, the weakening of musical islands that are less monetized and therefore more democratic, such as the program Rehearsal (which has never been the same since the death of its creator, Fernando Faro, in 2016, limiting itself to reruns) and the Viola, My Viola (which, without its creator, Inezita Barroso, who died in 2015, has been showing reruns since 2019), both on TV Cultura, was a serious blow to the valuable spaces of less visible artists. Rare long-lived space, the High hoursby Serginho Groisman, on Globo, still manages to give relevance to live music.
What is promised by Globo to take the place of The Voice is something else: a reality show along the lines of BBB directed by Boninho. His name will be Star of the House and the proposal is to showcase singers “from all musical genres” (as the broadcaster announces, which would already be technically impossible). They will build their careers under a lot of tension and discord (the food for Boninho’s audience that should never be that of a composer) in a confinement broadcast 24 hours a day. It doesn’t need to debut for us to know that music won’t be the protagonist of the business.
Silvio Santos, in turn, has been trying to reissue, since March 3rd, one of his greatest creations alongside the Sunday at the park: O Freshman Show, first aired in 1977. His daughter, Patrícia Abravanel, the new presenter, welcomed the drag queen Gysella Popovic, a cover group of the band One Direction and some K-Pop dancers as freshmen at the premiere. In other words: much more entertainment than music, as all the covers of the song have always been. Freshman Show emerged mainly in the 1980s. With respect to nostalgic fans, music and musicians have never been treated well in the circus stage environments created by most of the presenters of the auditorium program. In some of them, the production team charged ‘jabás’ for musicians to have a space that they should deserve due to their talent. In others, the drummer would play standing on a decorative snare drum and cymbal while the singer dubbed his own voice. Music can never miss that.
In addition to the circus of reality shows that broadcasters can see when they think about musical programs with a pop scope, there is an asset of incalculable affection that only musicians and great actors are capable of producing for television audiences. It’s raw emotion. If we are experiencing the greatest profusion of these musical talents, unidentifiable due to lack of curation, not the absence of human material, TV is missing the train that would take it to the forefront of a new business. Opening generous spaces for talent brought in by specialists hired to investigate streets, theaters, concert halls and social networks, and not fish on Spotify’s most played charts, as festival curators do, would open a powerful front in their concept of musicals and it would return, remodeled to suit the new times, its status as a launching pad for career artists.
That tell the life story of these artists, but ensure that the songs are performed from beginning to end, moving and captivating, new and vital. And let them, the songs, be the stars of the programs. “Everything you do in life that aims to be great”, the revolutionary program director at Globo in the 1970s, Nilton Travesso, told me, during an interview that I will never forget, “have 90% dedication and 10% craziness.” He said it was necessary to have faith in the gift, as Solano Ribeiro’s festivals had in Elis Regina, Chico Buarque, Jair Rodrigues and Gilberto Gil, or as Paulinho Machado de Carvalho’s programs had in Roberto, Erasmo and Wanderléa. The music and the performer can have more power than the ideas of a producer. The Voice.
