In recent weeks, “Tremembé” (Prime Video) and “Os Donos do Jogo” (Netflix) generated 649,714* public broadcasts on Brazilian networks. It is a volume comparable to the country’s biggest recent peaks and, more importantly, it reveals something about the way Brazilians consume crime narratives. 71% of mentions make direct reference to criminal characters, while only 8% mention victims. It’s not judgement. It’s a statistical pattern: digital attention is organized around the agents of crime, not its consequences.
The division between series helps to understand the phenomenon. “Os Donos do Jogo” concentrates 58% of mentions, driven by a young audience, high volume of edits and a jump in 142% in searches for “Jogo do Bicho” on Google after the premiere. “Tremembé” takes the other 42%, but operates with a different thematic density: 37% of the comments speak directly about real cases, while in “Os Donos do Jogo” this number is 14%. Fiction broadens the scope; true crime deepens the discussion.
Public behavior also differs. In “Tremembé”, the debate is more divided. Simply put: the polarization index is the ratio between praise and criticism. The closer to zero, the more uniform. The further away, the more asymmetrical. “Tremembé” has 0.63, indicating a strong presence of opposing opinions. “Os Donos do Jogo” has 0.28, showing a more homogeneous behavior, with majority acceptance. It doesn’t mean a series is “better” or “worse”; they just mobilize different emotions.
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Character data reinforces this. In “Tremembé”, 45% of mentions go to Suzane von Richthofen, followed by Elize Matsunaga (25%), Nardoni (15%) and the Cravinhos brothers (10%). It is the repetition of a pattern observed in true crime works: the figures with greater prior recognition focus the debate. In “Os Donos do Jogo”, the protagonism is redistributed between Prophet (40%), Mirna (30%), Galician (15%) and Shaman (10%). The difference is not in the morals of the characters, but in the way the audience organizes their attention.
The vocabulary of the two series shows how the public positions itself in the face of crime. In “Tremembé”, 61% of mentions bring terms linked to criminal materiality: “heinous”, “prison”, “report”, “murder”, “real crimes”, “case dynamics”.
This semantic field is very different from that of “Os Donos do Jogo”, where only 18% of the comments make direct reference to criminal structures and the rest revolve around “cast”, “chemistry”, “scene”, “aesthetics” and “character”. On TikTok, the asymmetry repeats itself: videos of true crime in Brazil accumulate 1.9 billion viewswhile content about the Netflix series performs better when the focus is charisma and relationships between characters, editsnot the crime itself.
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This difference also appears in the way the public distributes empathy. In “Tremembé”, the proximity to real crimes makes sympathy residual, but not non-existent. Elize Matsunaga appears in 25% of mentions of the series, and only 3% of the total are partially sympathetic in tone, much less than popular memory sometimes suggests. Suzane, Nardoni and the Cravinhos have a much higher proportion of explicit disgust and negative vocabulary (“hideous”, “cold”, “monster”).
In “Os Donos do Jogo”, fiction reorganizes the dynamics: Prophet and Mirna concentrate 70% of the references and carry the audience into a field of cinematographic, not factual, identification. The crime remains as a narrative structure, but is no longer the main object of attention.
The conclusion is not to say that Brazil glamorizes or condemns criminals. The data points out something else. Crime is interesting because it offers a very specific logic of attention: it is an event that combines familiarity, tension, public memory and a set of characters that the country already recognizes, whether in reality or in fiction. “Tremembé” brings the viewer closer to the chronology of the events; “Os Donos do Jogo” distances, stylizes and reorganizes.
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And perhaps this is the final reflection: it is not the crime itself that attracts — it is the crime’s ability to explain something about the country, perhaps an indication of how Brazil understands conflict, power, injustice, desire, punishment and protagonism. Interest does not arise because fiction exaggerates. It arises because Brazilian reality has never ceased to be a territory where crime occupies a central place in the public imagination.
In the end, the data shows a simple and profound difference: the connection to crime changes when the story is possible. In “Os Donos do Jogo”, fiction offers an emotional shortcut — young, attractive characters, far from any affective memory, allowing the audience to root for the antihero without going through the discomfort of reality. In “Tremembé”, the weight of heinous crimes breaks this pact: parricide, family cruelty, irreparable violence.
There, the narrative does not authorize full identification because the viewer recognizes that it existed and that it injured something fundamental in the social fabric. It is this asymmetry that explains the behavior of networks: when crime is stylized, empathy expands; when it’s documentary, she retreats. The two series show that proximity to the fact defines the limit of our empathy. Fiction allows twisting; reality demands distance. And it is precisely in this difference that the public reveals more about themselves than about the works.
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*Methodological note
Period analyzed: 10/29 to 11/11
Total volume: 649,714 public issues
Fontes: X/Twitter (56%), Instagram (24%), TikTok (15%), YouTube (5%)
