Biography and Italian Television
The biopic genre has remained a cornerstone of Italian fictional television. The subjects of the many biographies realized by Italian television share a single, distinct characteristic; they are all from past time periods. Some of the topics relate to religious matters, others are more non-objectively historical. There has been a temporal turn at the beginning of the 21st century that has spawned in televisual storytelling techniques. A widespread and prolonged "back to the past" has been among the most common. The return to the past may assume more elusive -though not irrelevant-forms. It is worth noting the emergence of a form of visibility of the past whose peculiarity resides in lived and embodied modality. It is marked by the unmistakeable traces of the passage of time of elderly actors. People older in age appear in quite a few recent fictions. Elderly figures have become the pillars of the family in Italian TV dramas. Un Medico in Famiglia, the most popular and long lived of the contemporary family series has pioneered this trend in actors. It has rendered elderly character "granddad Libero," the only stable moral and educational anchorage of reference in a multi-generational household that is constantly undergoing change.