Indian TV is doomed to remain in the shadow of Bollywood films
A huge percentage of television programming in India is directly inspired by film plots, characters, and even titles.
One would have expected that the advent of newer platforms such as Netflix or Amazon Prime which have already started to look at producing original content out of India, would lay the foundation of a new era for television.
But one can safely say that the more things promise to change, the more they remain the same.
Phenomenon
The recent news of the Shah Rukh Khan-Sunny Deol-Juhi Chawla starrer Darr (1993) getting a makeover in the form of a web series is a sign as good as any that, perhaps, Indian television is doomed to remain in the shadow of our films.
While the phenomenon of television being the poorer cousin of films might ring true in most countries, if one were to go solely by the entertainment industry in the US, the narrative changes.
For nearly a decade and a half now, the average viewer in the US, and by extension anywhere in the world, is living in what is seen as the golden age of television.
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| Shah Rukh Khan-Sunny Deol-Juhi Chawla starrer Darr (1993) is getting a makeover in the form of a web series. |
Since the debut of HBO’s Sopranos (1999-2007), where an Italian-American mafia head Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) juggles between managing his family and criminal life while confiding his affairs to his psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi, television has not been the same.
It has become even more vibrant than films, and with shows like Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and House of Cards not only has television spawned an entire generation of great actors and story-telling, but also changed how people look at the medium.
One of the reasons why the second coming of American television circa 1999 managed to change perceptions was the fact that it did not try to replicate films in the smaller format.
There was a clear demarcation between the narratives of the two. Close on the heels of Sopranos, David Simon’s The Wire (2002-08) took a hard look at the narcotics scene in Baltimore through the eyes of law enforcers, law, dealers and users, and helped convey that television could also be literary in its themes.
Both Sopranos and The Wire were lauded for their realistic portrayal of urban life.
In many ways, what the two managed to do for television in the United States mirrored what Hum Log and Buniyaad did for television in India in the early 1980s.
Two of the first soaps to capture the imagination of millions, both Hum Log and Buniyaad were about the people who were watching these shows unlike popular films, which connected with the viewer at some level.
Ideology
The familial trials of a mid- to lower income household in Delhi, Hum Log (1984-85) captured the prevailing mood of the average Indian, who was too busy making ends meet to question the lofty Nehruvian ideology that had almost come to a pass in the mid-1980s.
Buniyaad (1986), on the other hand, showed the transmigration of family following the Partition a little over four decades ago.
The two together arched perhaps the entire lifetime of an aam Hindustani since the creation of independent India.
Maybe it was the coming of all things that saw the creation of some exceptional television in India in the form of Karamchand, Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, Nukkad, Tamas, Wagle Ki Duniya, Malgudi Days, Bharat Ek Khoj, to name a handful, and of course nestled in between were the immensely successful Ramayan and Mahabharat.
Mindset
It is not like television in India has not changed with the times.
In the last decade and a half, stars such as Amitabh Bachchan, Madhuri Dixit, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Govinda, Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan have hosted their own shows, and some like Amitabh Bachchan and Anil Kapoor have even dabbled in fiction with Yudh, and the Indian version of 24, respectively.
With the option of web series and direct-to-home television, original content can assume a whole new meaning but most still continue to think of replicating films on a smaller scale.
Even if a complete dissociation with films is not possible, a balance can always be struck like in the case of Anurag Basu’s Stories By Rabindranath Tagore (Epic Channel) where Basu’s cinematic imagination was not too overbearing to not allow justice to be done to the narrative keeping the format in mind.
Can one really blame the talent associated with television for its abysmal state in India when even films are being rehashed with great alacrity?
Perhaps it is the mindset that needs to be altered - television is not a substitute for films - in order for new television to truly arrive in India.
Films, as recent as Darr, being re-jigged as a web series might be a portent of a new low that alternate narrative formats in India would be relegated to for no fault of theirs.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)