A Vida Como Ela É...

A Vida Como Ela É... turns Nelson Rodrigues' midcentury short fiction into a series of compact, self-contained TV episodes. Over the course of the show, forty separate stories are staged, each highlighting ordinary people whose passions and petty cruelties push them into morally questionable choices. Rather than sensationalizing, the adaptations lean on black humor and terse dialogue to reveal how social expectations and private desires collide, producing embarrassment, scandal, and bitter irony. Tone shifts from light, sardonic comedy to stark drama, and the results are snapshots of human behavior that emphasize hypocrisy, repression, and the small violences of everyday life.

Created by Euclydes Marinho, the series premiered in 1996 and directly adapts Nelson Rodrigues' short stories from 1951 to 1961 for television, aiming to retain the original bite and moral ambiguity.

In widely available records the series did not receive major national or international awards, and it is not commonly listed among big prize winners for that season of Brazilian TV.

Putting Rodrigues' controversial voice on mainstream television sparked conversation about the limits of taste on TV and the ways private scandals reflect public norms. For viewers familiar with the playwright, the show reaffirmed his reputation for exposing social double standards, and for newer audiences it served as an introduction to his darker comedic sensibility.

Reception has been mixed, reflected in modest viewer ratings and a small sample of reviews, with praise aimed at faithful adaptations and the performances in many episodes, and criticism directed at uneven quality across the forty installments. The series repeatedly returns to themes of desire, shame, hypocrisy, and the gap between appearances and private life, offering an often uncomfortable mirror on social manners without offering tidy moral judgments.