Word: soap
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...MARINHO, 98, media magnate and one of Brazil's richest and most powerful men; in Rio de Janeiro. Inheriting a small newspaper from his father when he was 20, he built O Globo into an empire whose television stations reached 99.9% of the country's homes and broadcast Brazilian soap operas around the world...
...decide to analyze my tears. My pragmatic, journalist side is upset and angered by the futility of some of these pilgrimages, particularly those of the parents who have brought mentally disabled children here. Holy water doesn’t stop cancer, chemotherapy does; and a three-dollar bar of soap in the shape of the Virgin Mary won’t do much in the way of healing birth defects. But my emotional, aesthetic side is completely struck by the wonder of the scene: by the music echoing from the giant underground basilica, by the way people?...
This may all be very predictable, but that's not a problem. The O.C. (as in Orange County, where the show is set) is a teen soap, and we fans of the genre no more want it to avoid cliches than we want McDonald's to serve escargots. We just want it to let us live vicariously the lives of wealthy people while also looking down on them. A decade ago, Beverly Hills, 90210 flattered heartland viewers by testing the Midwestern values of the transplanted Walsh family in BMW-and-bulimia Babylon. The O.C.'s outsider premise is both older...
...than Ryan in the socially savage O.C.--kick up their characters to two, even 2 1/2 dimensions. Director Doug Liman (Swingers) handles the stock scenes deftly: our first look at the Mean Jock (pulls up in SUV, kisses girl, flashes a cocky, aggressive grin) is a compact haiku of soap-character exposition. And it's refreshing, after years of exhaustingly self-conscious soaps in the Dawson's Creek mold, to see an old-school, un-ironic teen drama whose characters don't sling pop-culture bons mots like ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY interns...
...Teen-soap diehards know there's only one place for this story to go, at best: a long trip through high school, college, receding hairlines and eventual appearances on The Surreal Life XXVI. But The O.C. looks to have enough heart, talent and wit to generate a few seasons' worth of luxurious suds. As Ryan would say, in the teen-soap business, being 100% original doesn't make you smart. Delivering a formula with so much style and believability that it feels new again--that does...