Wikipedia
Malhação (, Workout in English) is a Brazilian soap-opera for the teenage audience. The soap started in 1995, and was set in a fictional Gym Club called Malhação on Barra da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro. Through the years the location varied slightly. Although the name of the soap remained the same, it was set in the Múltipla Escolha High School for nine seasons. In the twenty-second season, the location returned to be a gym, the Gael's Martial Arts Gym, placed within the art school Ribalta.The following season brought the school back. In the later the Academy setting back to "Acadmemia Form".
By the end of the fourteenth season, each episode of Malhação began with a cold open technique, preceded by a retrospective of the previous episodes, continuing the narrative that follows. This technique was a brand of serial, used since the first season, but was abolished from the beginning of the fifteenth season.
Malhação reached its peak in the eleventh season, with Guilherme Berenguer, Juliana Didone and Marjorie Estiano, with the following season starring Fernanda Vasconcellos, Thiago Rodrigues and Joan Balaguer as the leads, and the ratings decreased from this season on reach an incredible 42 million viewers. The series is being broadcast in several countries by Globo Internacional, including SIC (between 1995 and 2007, airing with the name "New Wave") in Portugal and by ABC Family in Canada.
The show inspired others soaps, like Portuguese channel TVI's Morangos com Açúcar, which is strongly based on the Malhação format, and Brazilian channel Rede Record's, Alta Estação.