By Shailesh Kapoor
Weekly ratings are a source of excitement and anxiety in the television fraternity. The day and time of their release may have changed over the years, but the drama they bring along has not. Be it a small channel that should not even be looking at a weekly number in isolation, or a big channel where a single episode has more viewership that a small channel’s entirely weekly audience, there’s something in it for everyone.
But if you detach a bit, weekly ratings are exciting only to the extent of knowing that big headline. Like a new show with much hype not opening well. Or like the dark horse Naagin getting a start so incredible it made you go: ‘There must be some error here!’ But you don’t get such headlines every week.
This week, though, was an exception. We got a headline that was worth the long wait (since Naagin last year). The Sunday, June 12 episode of The Kapil Sharma Show, featuring the cast and the director of Marathi blockbuster Sairat, became the highest-rated episode of the program, and by a significant margin too.
Despite the BARC advisory that broadcasters should not use % Ratings in any official communication, the 3.7 number was all over social media yesterday. You can’t hold a good story back, after all.
The episode rated almost 70% more than the Saturday episode in the same week, and almost 30% higher than the launch event featuring Shahrukh Khan.
Now this should make no sense, right? Sairat may have set new benchmarks for Marathi theatrical business, but why should regional content deliver at a national level? A look at the Maharashtra ratings answered the question in no uncertain terms. The numbers look unreal in today’s times, being 200% more than the national average. And that meant that even if some of the other markets dropped, one state could single-handedly pull the national (HSM Urban) number to a record level.
Sairat is a rare film and one can’t expect this to become a trend. And if even we have more success stories like it, there is a geographical limitation. Among the four language states in HSM (quite a misnomer, as some of these markets are not Hindi-speaking, which is the whole point here), Maharashtra has by far the highest representation in the ratings universe. A content piece around Gujarat will have to work doubly hard to get the same impact at the national level, because of lower weightage. And Punjab and West Bengal are even lower in their contribution to the universe.
While the regional learning may thus have limited relevance, there’s another one that is far more useful. The film released on April 29, and the episode in question aired six weeks after its release. The episode’s success relied on a sizeable fan base of the film. Equally importantly, there was more to ask and do, as the chatter and the fun and games centred on the familiar content of the film. The episode, in effect, becamea homage to the film, than a promotion of it.
This honesty of intention shone through the content. It won’t take much thought for even Maharashtra audiences to desert a big Marathi film’s pre-release promotional episode. But honest content, without a peg to be sniffed out, can touch hearts. More power to those who made this special one happen.
Now waiting for the next substantive ratings headline.