The College 2021: why we must be wary of imitations

However replicable a formula may be, nothing can question the infallibility of the original. Rai2 knows something about it that, after having tried several times to strike the still hot iron and to give life to more or less successful clones, from The barracks a I wanted to be a magician, she surrendered to the fact that The college, the program produced by Banijay Italia, which officially sanctioned the success of the docu-reality packaging in Italy, will always be a cut above the faded and opaque copies that television is trying in vain to elevate to the same success. It took several years before that The college find its own identity and a hard core of loyalists but, also thanks to the presence of a fixed and recognizable cast – first of all, the lady overseer played by Lucia Gravante – and to a series of ritualized junctions such as the terrible haircut, the success of a program that no longer has anything to prove, but only to maintain, is now under everyone’s eyes.

To be crucial for each edition, however, is the choice of a strong cast of boys, with something to say. The enterprise is not easy: every year that passes, the possible participants develop more awareness, thinking they can reach the College already with a written and pre-established character to be fed to the microcosm of social media. The strength of the program, however, lies precisely in the unpredictability of the reaction and in the desire of the boys to tell about themselves, not in the desire to make a career as an influencer once the broadcast is over – which, for the record, always happens -. If at the time of the Veline and Letterine television was considered a point of arrival, now it is the means to get to something else: sponsorships and followers, easy and immediate earning and visibility fed comfortably from the bathroom at home and not. more in the spotlight. In this sixth edition of the College, there seemed to be many beautiful and finished characters, but it was enough to go a little deeper to realize that the boys’ masks, when it comes to touching the strings of their sensitivity, are the first to fall.

This is the case, for example, of Sofia Federico, the activist who never stops talking and who always seems to want to be right but who, at the time of reading the theme commissioned by Professor Maggi, was able to reveal, with great naturalness, her greatest fear: not to be understood, fear of being misunderstood. Discole like Gaia Cascino on the other hand, they have the merit of quickly abandoning the speck and of revealing that fragility that the professors are gradually able to bring out together with the harmony of their classmates. However, there are also desperate cases such as Simone Casadei, the handsome man who, at least for now, struggles to emerge as something different from the listless bully who proved himself in the first episode. For the rest, the reassuring presence of the overseer, by Maggi, of Petolicchio, of Carnival and of the principal Bosisio they reassure the spectators confirming, once again, that we must always trust the originals and be wary of bad copies.