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:
“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)
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)