There couldn’t have been a worse fiftieth anniversary celebration. Nothing that hadn’t been widely predicted, let’s be clear, but the implementation of this “Domenica In”, yet another by Mara Venier, fully respected the fears of the spectators, who perhaps hoped to be surprised and proven wrong.

In July we evoked ‘gattopardismo’, that is, the program’s tendency to announce a thousand revolutions and then always find itself the same. And so it was again this year: the 2025-2026 season is exactly like the past ones: everything revolves around the ‘Queen of Sunday’, the only large bright star that shines in a solar system where other small planets rotate around it.

Mara Venier and the “little planets” around her

The little planets, in this sense, are Teo Mammucari, Enzo Miccio and Tommaso Cerno, who form a team that, in fact, is not a team. Mara plays alone, rarely passes the ball and, the few times she does, expects to get it back quickly.

They call it a choral “Domenica In”. In reality it would be enough to count the minutes on air of the individual protagonists to dismantle this thesis. Venier dominates in the block dedicated to “Dancing with the Stars” and in the one-to-one interviews where she obviously appears alone.

Cerno comes into view when journalistic support is needed, but remains one step behind. Yet, of the three he is the luckiest. Miccio, in fact, with his corner dedicated to fashion and customs, can be glimpsed close to the closing credits. His intervention is always hasty, distracted and often disturbed. Chaos that we find in the Mammucari segment, the most restless of the band, as it is still orphaned of a precise and defined location.

“Domenica In” is the Leopard of Italian TV

Having started with the ‘Billboard’ telephone game, which ended in chaos right from the start, Mammucari subsequently moved on to rambling calls from home without the slightest orientation. It was then the turn of ‘let’s play with Teo’, where the confusion took over the rest. A parenthesis further archived and which last Sunday was replaced by “The safe”, to be opened by identifying the right four-digit code.

A difficulty inversely proportional to the original banality of the ‘board’, which places Mammucari in an eternal limbo, generated by the total authorial disengagement. A shame, because the former face of “Libero” – who finds his deserved redemption in “Lo disorientated” – could have excelled in a truly renewed and tested context. On the contrary, it suffers from disorder and the absolute lack of orientation, which make this “Sunday In” the worst in recent decades.

The path to take was another

Gabriele Corsi candidly admitted that the path to follow in the summer was another one at the Festival dello Spettacolo: “The reality is very simple, there was a project that excited me and as sometimes happens it changed. Other choices were made and the idea of ​​making a segment of the program with the game seemed ineffective to me.”

From what appears, the desire of the member of the Medusa Trio was to set up a part of the broadcast independently. A sort of table, where you could invite friends and characters who could generate entertainment and ironic comparisons. Will evidently suffocated in the cradle which left the field to the solutions that we all know and which Corsi opposed.

No one can say how it would have gone and what kind of show it would have turned out to be. What is certain is that it would have been the only innovative option inside a crumpled and heavy container, which the half century of history carried on its shoulders did not deserve at all.