Why watching Indian TV sucks

Watching television these days, I'm reminded of the Bruce Springsteen song "57 Channels": "Well now home entertainment was my baby's wish/So I hopped into town for a satellite dish/ I tied it to the top of my Japanese car/ I came home and I pointed it out into the stars/ A message came back from the great beyond/ There's fifty-seven channels and nothin' on."

Although there's much more to watch these days, it all seems to be more of the same. Programming has become predictable and jaded. Every new channel offers similar fare. The formula is this: some mythologicals, a crime show, saas-bahu soaps, some slapstick, and lots and lots of Bollywood. Even the channel names are tacky and unimaginative.

What kind of a name is Life OK or &TV? It's not surprising that Zindagi, which airs Pakistani shows, is such a success. The Indian viewer wanted some freshness; Pakistan happily obliged. In the early days of Doordarshan there was less on TV but it was qualitatively much better. The first soaps like Buniyaad and Hum Log were family sagas but far more believable and convincing than the soaps on air today.

There was a solidity to the writing. They too were about joint families but went beyond detailing the machinations of catty mothers-in-law. There was more variety too. Khandaan was about corporates. Ados Pados was set in a housing colony. Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi's gentle humour still retains a lingering sweetness. The early days of cable were exciting too. New ideas were tried out. Some were absurd maybe but were interesting experiments nevertheless. Like the Hinglish news on Zee.

One difference between then and now is the influence of Bollywood. In the eighties, Doordarshan kept Bollywood content to a minimum. There was the Sunday evening film of course but DD didn't spend too much money on it, usually choosing to air the choicest flops because they were cheap to buy. Once a week you got to see Hindi film songs on Chitrahaar. There was some cinema chat on Phool Khile Hain Gulshan, with Tabassum. And that was it.

Back then it was Hindi cinema which catered to the lowest common denominator. TV showed a lot of home grown art cinema and documentaries. Things began to change in the late nineties and early noughties. As satellite TV settled down to a formula which catered only to the masses, Bollywood reoriented itself. One began to hear of films that were meant for the 'masses', and those that were meant for the "classes". The multiplex film came into its own. It was not necessary to make a film that made sense to the entire Indian population. The traditional Bollywood extravaganzas still get made but there's room for other stuff.

This is the reverse of what has happened in the UK and the US. There TV is where new ground is broken, whereas Hollywood films remain stubbornly formulaic. Hollywood superhero films need to be able to speak to anyone anywhere in the world. They are dubbed in several languages. TV shows on the other hand cater to specific demographics, which allows them much more freedom, and enables to them to tap the full potential of this powerful medium.

I'm not saying that television programming need necessarily be highminded or intellectual. Even tabloid television in India is on the wane. Maybe it has to do with our censorship laws. I was okay with shows like Sach Ka Saamna and Emotional Atyachaar, which many found salacious and shocking. These shows performed a valuable function in a conservative society like ours. They blew the lid off Indian hypocrisy. For the first time, Indians spoke about adultery and sex outside of marriage on national TV.

And then they were taken off. There is a dearth of ideas. Television needs a constant drip of new iconic shows. Nothing much has happened after Roadies and Splitsvilla, and those shows are now industry veterans, having gone on for more than a decade. The programming on English-language channels is equally disappointing. Channels refrain from putting out edgier shows because of fear of being shut down by the government. So they stick to showing funny home videos about cats doing funny things around the house, or people playing pranks on each other.

The movie channels only air martial arts flicks or James Bond or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. As if that's all the movies that were ever made. TV is such an exciting medium. Unfortunately, we don't seem to be doing much with it. Channels need to stop following formulas and looking alike. We need more good drama, more cool documentaries, more daring reality television. We need to generate our own ideas, rather than buy reality TV ideas from the west and trying to Indianise them.

Out of sheer boredom, I've started watching regional channels. My favourite is Mrs Bhagyashali on ETV Bihar. It's genuinely funny, even if inadvertently so. The dumb games they make the housewives play are far more entertaining than any run-of-the-mill Roadies task.

If you ask people who work in Indian television about the sad state of affairs, they will blame the audience. It's an open question: is the audience really that dumb or is television underestimating our intelligence?