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When the 44-year-old journalist Francesca Fagnani moderated the second evening of the Sanremo Festival on February 8, she had only just become famous. In fact, Beasts, the late night program hosted on Rai 2 for years, had suddenly become very popular in recent months, especially on social networks. “I don’t think there is one reason for this success, but many different factors,” explains Fagnani. «Certainly, it was an advantage to intercept a young and trendy audience, which is therefore partly different from that of generalist television. It was certainly an advantage for us, but I can’t say why it happened.”
Fagnani’s face became even more widely known after the Sanremo evening and then in the following weeks when Belve was moved to prime time for five longer and richer episodes, the last of which aired on Tuesday. But the most surprising aspect of the program’s success is the attention it garnered on TikTok, on Instagram, and on Twitter, where the videos of the most embarrassing, funniest, irritating, or in various ways “scandalous” moments of Fagnani’s interviews have become practically literary Genre. A rather rare thing for a TV show with interviews on Rai.
Beasts was conceived in 2018 by Fagnani and popular TV writer Irene Ghergo. It was born as an interview program with a very simple and essential format: in a dimly lit studio, the guest was invited to take a seat on a visibly uncomfortable stool and answer questions from Fagnani, who was always the only moderator. From the outset, the show’s strength has been its tone and choice of questions, which viewers and commentators found bold and provocative, but rarely awkward or inappropriate. The characteristic of Fagnani’s television style that is most emphasized today is the contrast between his cheekiness when asking questions and his attitude: “With a dazzling smile, he “bites” the interlocutor, pushes him to the limit,” he recently wrote about her the journalist and Commentator Aldo Grasso on Corriere.
“My goal is not to make the guest feel guilty, and in fact everyone is happy after the conversation,” explains Fagnani. “But I don’t want any limits and I don’t give too many compliments. I don’t do commercial interviews because I find that the end result with my approach is much more satisfying not only for the audience but also for the interviewee».
Not everyone thinks so: During the Sanremo week, the singer Fedez said he had not accepted the invitation to Beasts because “it doesn’t come out well there”. Some questions appear in all Beasts interviews: for example the first: “What ‘beast’ do you feel like?” or the last: “If you could bring someone back to life, who would it be and what would you say? to you?”. They’re also usually the ones who get the least interesting answers. However, most questions are personalized and unpredictable: guests can never know them in advance and cannot demand that what they said in the studio be is cut in the editing of the episode.
One of last season’s most-commented guests was Rocco Casalino, a former communications manager for the 5-Star Movement and before that a Big Brother competitor, to whom Fagnani read an old statement, saying he loved Charles Baudelaire, but could do so when asked did not give the title of one of his poems and then confused it with the author of the novel, Madame Bovary. Just minutes earlier, Casalino had managed to speak about exploring one’s own sexuality in an extremely intimate way, perfectly conveying the complexity of the subject. “The fact is that Beasts is an all-talking program, nothing relieves or distracts and creates an almost claustrophobic climate of trust: there is no relief,” explains Fagnani.
Fagnani’s tone and choice of questions, according to many, make Beasts a remarkable show, different in its own way from the other similar shows that happen to be seen on Italian television. As columnist Alice Oliveri wrote, in Italy “one rarely finds interviews on television that have nothing to do with advertising logic and are not crooks organized by the press offices”. Beasts guests are not flattered or complimented, let alone called, because they’ve just written a book or filmed a movie, and when they are, that’s almost never the subject of the interview.
Initially, the guests were mostly female: the most relevant in 2018 included Giorgia Meloni and Virginia Raggi. The idea was “to tell about determined, ambitious women who aren’t necessarily motherly or not necessarily nice: Because they exist and I wanted to tell the reality, I went beyond the usual portrayal of female victims, which for heaven’s sake is an untouchable one Representation is, but it’s not the only one”. Then something changed over the years, “I ran out of women a bit” and the male guests increased: last season the guests were more or less half and half been.
With the transition to prime time, the format has changed slightly: now the studio audience has come in, and then some comical interventions have been added between interview and interview. In addition to actress Michela Andreozzi, personalities from the world of social networks were chosen for their production: Cristina Di Tella, famous for her impersonations on Instagram and TikTok, as well as Maria Chiara Cicolani and Valeria De Angelis, known on Instagram as Eterobasiche. This was coupled with more aggressive press office work, with a promotional strategy based on disseminating the most newsworthy “revelations” (albeit often taken out of context) of the pre-release interviews of each episode, which achieved major hits on the tabloids, and more .
Videos of some excerpts from the interviews with the model Bianca Balti, the actor Claudio Amendola and the President of the Senate Ignazio La Russa were published weekly on the websites of the most important newspapers, which led Fagnani to speak also about very personal topics, with results that in some cases they have provoked admiration, in others – such is the case with what La Russa said about the possibility of having a gay child – outrage.
All of these things have increased Beasts’ following online, a phenomenon that began even before the switch to prime time and is manifesting in different ways depending on the platform. For example, on Twitter, Beasts has become one of those shows that has live commentary, thanks to the fact that Fagnani has nurtured the bond with the fans very lovingly. On Instagram and TikTok, the format of a video interview clip is a great way to go viral, especially if it manages to stand out and be modern like Beasts.
From the television audience’s point of view, the success of Beasts is not extraordinary. In the transition to prime time, the number of viewers has grown significantly, reaching one million and 200,000 viewers with the last episode last Tuesday (equivalent to 7.3% of the share), but it is likely that the dissemination of its online content will be much more Reaching people, from TikTok, where the hashtag #beasts has more than 170 million views, to RaiPlay, where episodes are divided into “clips”, interviews and full episodes.