Popularity
The program has broken several records, including exceeding a 50% share of the ratings (with peaks of 60% during Season One). The fifth season recorded a decline in ratings; which has been put down to both the competition from rival reality television shows and the season's poor and hasty production. On the contrary, by the ninth edition, the show has recorded increasing ratings which took the program back to its original popularity.
In Italy Big Brother is a cultural phenomenon that has grasped the attention of both audience and press. The show is seen as a sociological experiment, an icon and symbol of the modern world, and derives its success from these factors.
Despite viewing figures declain over the years (especially in twelfth series) is Grande Fratello still one of most successful reality shows worldwide.
Read more about this topic: Grande Fratello
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“In everything from athletic ability to popularity to looks, brains, and clothes, children rank themselves against others. At this age [7 and 8], children can tell you with amazing accuracy who has the coolest clothes, who tells the biggest lies, who is the best reader, who runs the fastest, and who is the most popular boy in the third grade.”
—Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)