Beyond the time limits that restrict the period between the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Romanticism is a worldview that remains in many cultural, political and social forms in a indirect or explicit way, but always with a ambiguity sign that allows the understanding of the phenomenon both as a rejection of the bourgeois society, and as a way to adjust to the capitalist system through the scape from reality and individualism. Considering this conflicted aspect of the romantic sensibility, the objective of this work is to investigate its stay in mass culture, taking as its object the TV novel of Gilberto Braga with an emphasis on money as an agent of the dissolution of values. The work starts from the connections between the romantic phenomenon of melodrama and the feuilleton in its original context, to think how is the recovery of their traces in the peripheral modernity, highlighting how the novelist updates the European patterns in dialogue with the José de Alencar’s writing feuilletonistic models and also with other authors of radio novels and tv novels, especially Janete Clair. As corpus for the analysis were selected the novels Senhora (1975), Vale Tudo (1988) and Celebridade (2003).