Sai de Baixo
Sai de Baixo (a Brazilian Portuguese slang roughly translated as "get out of the way") is a Brazilian sitcom that first aired on Rede Globo from 1996 to 2002. It followed the lives of the members of a dysfunctional family, their maid and the doorman of the apartment building in which they lived. It ran for 7 seasons, from 1996 to 2002, on Sunday nights after the newsmagazine Fantástico. That means that it always aired after 10:00 pm, which was necessary given the show's heavy language and sexual innuendos. In 2000, however, the premiere of a new reality show shifted the program to the 11:30 p.m. slot, which lasted for about four months. After that the timeslot varied almost monthly, which started to hurt ratings. At one time, the show was airing around 12:30 a.m., which is considered the beginning of the "wasteland" of late night programming in Brazilian television, with fewer viewers and, therefore, fewer sponsors. In 2013, Globo's sister cable channel Canal Viva produced a revival of the show with four episodes. Although some of the characters hailed from the poorer layers of society (such as the maid and the doorman), as well as the richer (albeit impoverished, such as the former socialite), the program derived most of its humor from an acid criticism of the Brazilian middle class, its prejudices and views of the rest of the country and the world. This precept justified the sometimes harsh jokes involving racism, sexism and other politically incorrect notions. Format Sai de Baixo emerged as actor Luis Gustavo suggested to director Daniel Filho about doing a sitcom inspired by 1960s Família Trapo, recorded on a theater while following a dysfunctional family. The show was shot in a São Paulo theater, Teatro Procópio Ferreira. The program was shot there every Tuesday afternoon, but the theater was still receiving regular plays and spectacles, and the set had to be disassembled at the end of every shooting and then reassembled the following week, for the next shooting. The people involved in the show called it "the marathon of continuity", since every item of the family's apartment had to be in exactly the same place that it was in the previous episodes. In a further acknowledgment of its surroundings, every episode of the program ended with a curtain call. The show was rarely set outside its primary location, the living room of an apartment in Arouche Towers, a building in São Paulo's neighborhood Largo do Arouche. The biggest setting change occurred in 2000, when eight episodes were shot in a cafe in the building's ground floor, Arouche's Place. But the change was not well received by the audiences, and poor ratings forced the return of the apartment set. This was done in such a hurry that one of the episodes that took place in the Cafe was dropped and left unaired. Upon the return to the apartment, the writers decided that the Cafe had exploded in unclear circumstances, probably as part of an insurance