If Silvio Santos consolidated SBT with the maxim of playing on television, today, more than a year after his death, in August last year, his heirs seem to embody the same spirit. In the hands of the presenter’s third daughter, Daniela Abravanel Beyruti, the channel continues to rely on a constant back and forth in the schedule, sometimes looking to the past, sometimes to the future, thus reinforcing an aspect that was already Silvio’s trademark.
The most recent case occurred this week, when SBT canceled a Christmas special of Zezé di Camargo, the duo with Luciano, to broadcast “Chaves.” This came after his compatriot controversially criticized SBT News for the Abravanel family’s invitation to left-wing leaders like Lula to launch their new news channel on cable television and YouTube.
Beyruti defends himself by saying that after a period of trying to imitate the competition, SBT needs to return to its roots. He decided to satisfy Banheira do Gugu fans with a one-off return to Ratinho’s program in July. Emblematic of the 1990s, the attraction is one that best reflects the channel’s unruly tone, with soapy, half-naked people rubbing each other.
“I studied past successes and filtered out what is outdated and what can be put back on the air in an updated form,” Beyruti explains via email.
Also resurrected was Casos de Família, which was canceled in 2023 after 14 years on the air, leaving the public orphaned by the absurd gossip of ordinary people, ready to expose their private lives. This happened in the middle of the year and the program continues to air Monday to Friday.
Beyruti also brought back the police procedural Aqui Agora, also famous in the 1990s and responsible for launching names like César Tralli, now presenter of Jornal Nacional. But the public did not react and the channel is once again considering canceling the program.
Likewise, Datena was short-lived. He commanded Tá na Hora from December last year to May this year. “The direction of the channel did not correspond to what I thought I would continue to do in my programs,” he said at the time, before migrating to RedeTV! and, earlier this month, accepting an invitation from Lula to broadcast on TV Brasil and Rádio Nacional.
The return of Bom Dia & Cia, a children’s program that disappeared in 2022, under the direction of the clowns Patati and Patatá, also failed. Beyruti says the channel missed the ball by failing on children, precisely one of Silvio’s priorities in the past.
Bom Dia & Cia was closed this week, after six months on the air. Behind the scenes, the cancellation is attributed to lack of audience and revenue, a chronic difficulty for children’s programs.
The children’s soap front, another asset that SBT was known for, also suffered cuts to the drama team this year, but is expected to have investments in 2026, in partnerships with houses like Disney.
More exciting were the returns of the paintings Porta da Esperança and Topa Tudo por Dinheiro, classics now directed by Patricia Abravanel, Silvio’s fourth daughter and also the best known to the public. She took charge of the Silvio Santos program almost three years ago, since the presenter took leave to take care of his health.
“My sister becomes Silvio Santos in a skirt,” says Silvia Abravanel, the second daughter, currently in charge of Sábado Animado, a children’s attraction presented on Saturdays. “And Daniela is my father outside of television. We chose her to be president of SBT, and God put my prayers in her head that she would bring what was good in the past in a new way.”
Beyruti was elevated to vice president of the channel in April 2023, and in November of the following year, she assumed the presidency of the house. More discreet than her sisters, she was trained by her father to work behind the scenes, after studying communications in the United States. Among the heirs are also Rebeca, director of Roda a Roda, Cintia and Renata Abravanel, who also hold positions at SBT.
They often exchange compliments, but do not hide their disagreements. Silvia, for example, said she was against increasing evangelical programs in the programming, on the grounds that Silvio was Jewish. A spiritualist, she was adopted by the presenter during her first marriage, to Maria Aparecida Vieira Abravanel, Cintia’s mother; the other girls are the result of the relationship with Íris Abravanel, who converted to Christianity in 1998.
Silvia made the criticism shortly after Beyruti canceled Bom Dia Esperança, a five-minute segment that aired early, with messages of faith preached by Deive Leonardo, an evangelical influencer who has 16 million followers on Instagram but received no ratings.
This marriage between television and the Internet is in fact part of another strategy of Beyruti: she wants to make SBT more modern. So he gave a program to the influencer Virginia Fonseca, the one involved in the CPI das Bets and who, before that, was inexperienced in television.
Unlike the failure of the religious attraction, Sabadou com Virginia has been on the air for a year and a half and it has worked. According to data from Kantar Ibope published by SBT, the attraction has already been seen by 78 million people in Brazil.
He’s also happy that Virginia has attracted the attention of sponsors and that her face has helped boost SBT’s social media, which has increased its online presence. For positive impacts, Beyruti also hired influencer Lucas Guimarães, who launched the Eita Lucas! in March. He has already renewed his contract until the end of 2026.
But not everyone at SBT sees this favorably. Presenter Carlos Alberto de Nóbrega, close friend of Silvio and leader of A Praça é Nossa, one of the channel’s oldest shows, said that, for him, what is right is “every monkey in its place.”
“Television needs new faces, but it’s one thing to be at home, to dance, to play, to say ‘I use this product’. It’s another to do a two-hour show. Daniela wants young people, influencers, and she pays dearly for it, because the audience is falling,” he said, one of the few veterans still on the channel. Raul Gil said goodbye to SBT last year, a few months after Eliana, another member of the house, was hired by Globo.
Beyruti says she is aware that it is good to be careful and that influencers must forget the language they use on the Internet when they appear on television. She mentions Luccas Toon, a children’s attraction from Luccas Neto, a YouTuber with over 50 million followers, who failed when trying to replicate the sketches he posts on YouTube on SBT. The show is still on the air, but went off air at 6 a.m., an unappealing time for children.
But Carlos Alberto recognized that there were efforts on the part of the new boss. “Daniela tries. She must have shaken herself.”
It’s not all about roots, which is why the channel has not turned a blind eye to its neighbor’s grass, especially Globo’s. This was the case of the contract with Boninho, former director of the Rio television station who led the importation of The Voice Brasil.
SBT joined Disney as a partner on open TV to host the attraction presented by Tiago Leifert, which remained on Globo for over a decade. She returned in October this year, simultaneously on the channel and streaming Disney+, and did well with audiences in both houses, helping the channel compete for second place in Ibope with Record, today with the reality show A Fazenda. The profit from the bet is estimated to help balance revenues, after the broadcaster recorded a 5% drop, or 1.14 billion reais, in 2023.
At the same time, negotiations are underway for Ana Furtado, Boninho’s wife, to present a revival of Fábrica de Casamentos, a reality TV show broadcast since 2020, then directed by Chris Flores.
Beyruti seems particularly interested in introducing technology to television and frequently uses artificial intelligence. More than once she has recreated the image and voice of Silvio Santos with realistic holograms, in a gesture that also shows a certain difficulty in moving forward without the founder.
The most recent case occurred last week, during the launch event of SBT News, a project led by Fábio Faria, married to Patrícia and former Minister of Communications in the government of Jair Bolsonaro. This party, which also brought together Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court, worried Zezé di Camargo, a Bolsonarista, who accused the daughters of Silvio Santos of “prostitute” the SBT. The invitations to the authorities were, however, well aligned with a behavior that Silvio had adopted since the days of the dictatorship: flattering those in power.
Meanwhile, SBT’s programming director, Mauro Lissoni, returned to the company last year after a twenty-year absence and wants to reduce journalistic programming on the open television signal. He held this position between the 1980s and 2000s.
“I arrived and found that the schedule started with journalism at 2 a.m. and ended only at 2 p.m. That was never the essence of SBT,” he told the journalist of Troféu Imprensa, in June, another program that returned under this administration, after a three-year hiatus.
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