With their daily dose of melodrama, suspense, romance and tears, Brazil’s wildly popular telenovelas have never shied away from bringing social commentary into viewers’ living rooms.

Over the years, blockbuster soap operas have tackled any number of contentious issues, from class and sexuality, to dictatorship and deforestation.

But for decades, the issue of racial inequality has been conspicuous by its absence: despite the fact that 56% of Brazil’s population identifies as black or mixed-race, its soaps have displayed a glaring lack of diversity – in some notorious cases, white actors were even hired to play black roles.

Now, for the first time ever, the three prime-time telenovelas on Brazil’s dominant TV network Globo feature prominent black protagonists.

Six days a week Perfect Love (at 6pm), Never Give Up (at 7pm) and Land and Passion (9pm) serve up the traditional mix of family feuds, romance, betrayal and endurance – but played by a racially diverse cast.

It marks an unprecedented moment in Brazilian TV, which has long failed to represent its viewers.

“When there was [a black character] they were always in the role of a slave or domestic worker, never in a higher social position,” said Marisa Silva da Paixão, a 66-year-old retired municipal worker and keen telenovela-watcher from Salvador. As a black woman, Silva said she questioned the absence of characters who looked like her on the screen.

The underrepresentation of black Brazilians in positions of power remains an entrenched problem in a country which is still coming to terms with the erasure of its Afro-Brazilian past. As recently as 2018, Globo was publicly chided for airing a telenovela with an almost all-white cast, despite being set in Bahia, Brazil’s blackest state.

“The big victory right now is that you don’t just have black actors […] You have characters who have a right to their own objectives, characters who aren’t telling their story through the lens of the white gaze or as a consequence of racism,” said Elisio Lopes Jr, a black TV writer who co-authored Perfect Love, a 1940s period drama full of black characters and devoid of racial tensions.

For producers like Globo, which has been losing viewers to cable TV and streaming platforms in recent years, addressing concerns with diversity is also a way of recapturing an audience.

“Society wants to see itself better represented on-screen, and this attracts viewers,” said Rosane Svartman, the author and creator of Never Give Up.

Svartman’s show has struck a chord with the public, scoring higher ratings than its recent predecessors in the 7pm slot. Set in contemporary Rio de Janeiro, Never Give Uptells the story of working mother Sol, a go-getter from the unglamorous suburbs whose teenage dream of being a dancer hasn’t completely died. The telenovela has been praised for featuring a broad range of characters and giving a platform to previously ignored issues, such as evangelical faith and Afro-Brazilian syncretism.

“Never Give Up for me is really interesting because it deals with diversity, actual diversity, different types of black people,” said Raquel Oliveira, a 39-year-old tour guide from Rio who remembers watching telenovelas when she was as young as four. “We’re a diverse group of people, within the black community there are people who are evangelical, there are conservatives, progressive people, members of the LGBTQ+ community … The telenovela shows that.”

This is a conscious effort from Globo, which last year created a new department to improve its content’s diversity. Land and Passion, which premiered this month, features a cast including Indigenous and trans actors, and a child actor with albinism, as well as a black leading lady.

Attention is turning to representation behind the cameras too. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last week signed off on a 3.8bn reais ($760m) fund for the audio-visual sector, which imposes quotas for black and Indigenous representation on grant applicants’ projects.

“If you don’t build a moving chain within the cultural sector, the [black] protagonism of the stars, the aesthetic, the screen, is ephemeral,” said Samantha Almeida, who leads Globo’s new diversity push.

As a viewer, Oliveira agrees. “This representation is only worthwhile if we also have black people writing scripts, directing, producing.”

But this is still very much a work in progress, according to Lopes, the screenwriter. “It’s not conquered, not consolidated.”