Category: TV

By Shailesh Kapoor

History is defined by eras, and it’s no different for the entertainment business. If you look at Hindi cinema, for example, every decade has its own story to tell. The ’70s was the glorious decade, offering a mix of sensible commercial cinema and a new age movement called parallel cinema. The ’80s, in contrast, was the Dark Age, with meaningless potboilers dominating for most part, and music that would make you cringe today.

In the ’90s, Indian cinema found its family audiences back, offering tradition wrapped in modernity. In the new millennium, the language of Indian cinema started becoming young and semi-Western, as if to compensate for the overdose of tradition in the ’90s. In the decade we are in, the identity is still blurred, but we have four more years to go, and a unifying idea will surely emerge.

If we look at the Indian television business, the history is much shorter. We are only in our fourth decade. The ’80s can be called the Golden Age, when, despite limited content hours on offer, the quality was par excellence. The best minds in the country were involved with creating television, and the storytelling was on the lines of the cinema of the 70s in many ways.

Some may argue that this view of ’80s television being glorious is an erroneous one, because there were no options at that time and you were bound to like what you get. If that had been the case, those shows would have been forgotten by mid-’90s. But those of us who lived in that era fondly remember it even today. And in any case, history has to be judged for how things were at the time of it all happening.

The ’90s saw the advent of satellite television and a much wider variety, including international content, on offer. This variety would be the defining theme of this decade, as the plethora of choices took attention away from the content for a while. Yet, the content remained interesting, albeit less consistently than the 80s.

Barely had the new millennium started when we saw the advent of daily soaps. July 3, 2000 is when Kyunkii Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi went on-air. It was new-age television then, even though many failed to recognise its significance at that time. It mirrored the traditional tones of the cinema of the ’90s, but without the modernity wraparound. Many call the last decade regressive, but for the audiences that content targeted, it was a window to a vibrant world they had never seen. A world of big joint families, ceremonies, opulence, designed clothes, jewelry et al.

At the turn of the last decade, when this soap machine was running out of ideas, Indian television got a fresh lease of life with the advent of social, semi-realistic storytelling, led by Balika Vadhu.

And then, that was it. And here we are, in a decade that’s well on its way to become the Dark Age of Indian television.

To Be Continued…

Part 2 of this column will feature next week

By Shailesh Kapoor

Read Part 1

Look at what Indian television has done to itself, over the last five years in particular. In meetings with non-television executives, it’s a topic of ridicule. A gorilla falling in the love with the lead protagonist of a show is the latest metaphor of this discourse (for the record, that didn’t actually happen on the show). The metaphors may change, but the ridicule has gone stronger by the day. Because there are at least a dozen bizarre sub-plots playing out at any point of time, across channels and shows. And I’m not even counting regional content here.

But then, why should one worry about what a senior FMCG, media agency or film executive thinks of GEC content? They are not the target audience after all. Fair point, but the problem extends to the consumers (the target audience) too. They enjoy a hearty laugh on this topic, often dismissing it as something that’s done “TRP ke liye”. In the near future, they would be less forgiving.

In any case, the “TRPs” are not going up. The Hindi GEC genre has lost about 10% of its viewership since early this year. While this can be attributed to BARC India settling down and its measurement getting more robust, that’s an easy fig leaf to hide the viewer disenchantment behind.

The single-most telling evidence of the viewer-side problem has been discussed here before – that new shows have stopped opening. None of the 22 Hindi GEC weekday shows launched this calendar year opened at a first-week average rating of even 2%. And this problem has been magnifying over the last 2-3 years, with its first seeds sown even before BARC India ratings existed.

Some tend to pass the “blame” to digital and social media, suggesting that television is losing its significance because the Internet is taking over. While that may be true for a small section of audiences, when projected as a larger idea, it becomes a gross exaggeration. And cricket, film premieres and certain shows have continued to rate very well, highlighting that content deficit, more than anything else, must take the blame.

Naagin is one such show that has rated very well in its first season. It pains me when Naagin is clubbed with other examples of silliness on our television. Naagin was anything but that. It was an out-and-out fantasy show, well-produced and true to its promise. It did not start as something and then becoming something else. Our mythology and folklore has rich and imaginative stories to get inspiration from. Many of them have supernatural elements in them. Adapting them for television can surely not be a no-no.

The problems are largely with the dailies, and it’s a systemic problem. Episodes are conceived, written and shot on the fly. There is no real “development” on a running show – that precious word is reserved for new shows. But even there, ideas are increasingly moving away from what India wants.

If you are a television executive today, think of how you will be remembered three decades from now. “I worked in the dark age of Indian television, when nothing made sense and content was a subject of public mockery, for its unparalleled idiocy” can surely not be a good story to tell your grandchildren. Come to think of it, it can be a funny story though.

Yes, there are some exceptions that exist. But when an entire category gets branded in a particular way, the exceptions need to work that much harder to stand out.

Call it creative bankruptcy or just inertia, the problem is magnifying with every passing month. These are ideal signs for disruption waiting to happen, when someone enters (or redefines) the game, changes its rules, and walks away with all the glory.

I want to know who that “someone” is. And I look up to all good television executives, some of whom I truly respect, to find that someone within themselves.