It was a Netflix product, stay certain, you would have found the posters around. Nothing more distant from the wonderful doc on “Big Brother”, created by Mediaset on the occasion of the twenty -five years since its start, which on the contrary runs the risk of going unnoticed.

Discovered more than anything else with word of mouth, “Big Brother, the beginning” has not enjoyed official launches, nor of a pounding promotion, factors that today make the difference.

A moving journey, yet little is talked about

The tribute is available for free on Mediaset Infiniy and is a compelling and moving journey through time, with 2000 as a year of destination. An admirable and accurate research and memory work, with the celebration of the most iconic moments of the first historical reality show of Italian TV, the revelation of curious and anecdotes and sensational confessions by the protagonists.

It was an offer by Netflix, we said, the battage would have started weeks before, with promo fired at every hour of the day and night. Five or six episodes would perhaps have been created, to be churned out in Tozzi and Bocconi, and not a single special of one hundred minutes, to devour in the immediate.

The fault of a wrong promotion and also of a narrative that tends to make everything that is platform, better if and payment. Because let’s not make fun of: tell the friends you spent the evening watching a series on Netflix or Amazon Prime gives a thickness that the same confession combined with Mediaset and Raiplay would not ensure.

The offer itself is not important, but whoever conveys it. To suffrage this thesis, it would be enough to mention the case of “sea outside”. The first two seasons, aired on Rai 2 in 2020 and 2021 and subsequently loaded precisely on Raiplay, did not arouse particular reactions. Only once he took possession of Netflix, the fiction became a phenomenon of worship.

In short, it’s all a brand speech. Like when Netflix always announced the availability in his library of titles such as “A doctor in the family” and “I Cesaroni”. Result? General fury, in total contrast with the indifference of those who had never gone to look for the two fiction, without the need for subscriptions, respectively on Raiplay and Mediaset Infinity.

A documentary that deserves attention

Returning to the documentary, “Big Brother, the beginning” deserves all the attention of the world. For its invoice, for the archives consulted with intelligence and curiosity and even for an autocritic approach. The photograph of another world and, touched by reiterating it, of another program, which over time would have been less and less the same as itself, turning today not a distant relative of that first experiment, but even a stranger.

The sense of isolation and deprivation, in addition to a total inability to predict what it was experiencing (unlike today, with the “GF” exchanged for a placement office), will give the experience of three months and ten days the eternal and indissoluble uniqueness brand.