Uma Aventura

**A series that left its mark in the period in which it appeared.**

I don't believe there is a youngster in Portugal who hasn't read at least five or six books from the “Uma Aventura” collection. This collection of small books, still active today and with new releases on a regular basis, has been written by Ana Maria Magalhães and Isabel Alçada, and has been one of the great successes of children's and youth literature in Portuguese. For those who don't know, it's very similar to other collections of the same genre, in which a group of teenage friends meet to live several adventures where they fight against all kinds of criminals, find treasures, explore different places and go through different dangerous situations. The influence of renowned foreign collections such as “The Famous Five”, by Enyd Blyton, is clearly present in these books, which basically work in the same way, but with Portuguese characters.

What this SIC series simply did was, over several years and five seasons, bring some of these adventure books to television. It was, in large part, an attempt to respond to the fearsome competition from its rival channel TVI, which was also betting on a young audience thanks to “Morangos com Açúcar”. I don't know to what extent the series really helped to popularize the books it was based on, what I can say is that it found a space among the generation of children and teenagers who consumed it. Initially, the series aired in the afternoon, but even recently I saw some episodes being rerun on weekends, early in the morning, in the time that is traditionally reserved by Portuguese broadcasters for youth programming. In my personal case, and despite the fact that I avidly read most of the books when I was a teenager, I didn't attach much importance to the series. The reasons are simple: when it premiered, the successive scheduled times it was airing were never very convenient for me because of school and, when I finally had time to see it, I was already leaving adolescence behind, my interests were changing, and I didn't feel so eager to watch it. So I've only watched some episodes of this series in more recent years, without much interest, and I've never seen it in its entirety.

What I saw, however, is enough to give it a near-positive rating. The series is made for children and young people, adults and “young adults” like me will have difficulty liking this, but if they know the stories of the books they have read in the past, it is possible that they would like to watch the episodes of the books that they liked the most. Being TV content, the budget is what we already know, so it's better not to wait for a big production. The photography, honestly, is particularly unpleasant, even considering that it is a TV show, and even the credits don't have particularly elegant graphics. The actors were varying through the seasons, due to the fact that they were growing and changing, no longer being able to give life to the characters after some time. SIC invested in casting sessions and new talents, so the series was also a “school” for aspiring young actors. Some of them made a career and are still out there. This is the case of Salvador Nery and Francisco Areosa. But none of them are good actors here, they are, in good measure, learning from their mistakes. The series also had the special participation of several skilled actors, as necessary.

The result of this: it is a series that left its mark on a generation, like the books on which it was based. It's not a good series, it's not brilliant, there's foreign material of the same genre that is frankly better, but it was well worth effort.