A shorter version of this appeared in Open, 28 March 2011. A link is here.
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Time was television viewing in India used to be a family affair. Programmes didn’t always divide viewers on lines of gender; fiction wasn’t always coloured pink or blue. It is true the Doordarshan era didn’t offer us any channels to squabble over but what we got catered very nicely to everybody. We had epic sagas, urban family dramas, adapted works of literature, historicals, mythology, fantasy, thrillers and whodunits. The men enjoyed Byomkesh Bakshi, Barrister Vinod and Karamchand but they also followed Hum Log, Buniyaad and Khandaan.
All that changed at the turn of the century. A young woman called Ekta Kapoor came up with a soap opera named Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. It was targeted at women and they embraced it with an enthusiasm that had media watchers reeling. It altered the face of television-viewing in India, it spawned a thriving industry and the daily soap became an institution. Through the decade, women came to rule television – both on it and in front of it.
There are some positive spin-offs from the emergence of the ‘Saas-Bahu’ phenomenon but there were casualties too – the first of these being diversity in our television choices. The soap is such a dominant entity that although General Entertainment Channels (GECs) struggle every now and then to throw off its yoke, they haven’t managed it. Over the past year, reality television managed to appeal to male as well as female audiences but fiction – the citadel – is still held by women.
It is against this background that we must examine Sony TV’s attempts to offer programming with a slight male skew. Their long-running CID is a popular staple; in 2007 they tried to revive Karamchand, the carrot-chomping detective we loved in the ‘80s, and they recently introduced Adalat, a Perry Mason-style courtroom drama that actor Ronit Roy carries off with aplomb. But the most distinctive programming comes as a result of Sony TV’s partnership with Yash Raj Films Television. Made for metro audiences while the rest of the industry addresses the Indian small town, oriented towards general rather than female audiences, and by actually having male-centric narratives, YRF’s offerings are determinedly different.
In the beginning of 2010, the partnership yielded four fiction shows, all different from anything on the screen at the time. If they worked, they would mark the return of variety to mainstream television. Regrettably, they were not a raging success. Romantic comedies Mahi Way and Rishta.com were good but they were half heartedly promoted and badly scheduled. As for the others, you’d imagine that it’s difficult to mess up an old fashioned good-versus-evil yarn involving various kinds of delicious supernatural powers, but fantasy thriller Seven managed to mangle it comprehensively.
This year, YRF has come up with two shows: Khote Sikkey and Kismat. The first has a Mumbai cop assembling an unusual team of crime-fighters: five high-society, small-time offenders who help him gain entry and insight into the moneyed classes. Kismat is a saga on the lines of Jeffery Archer’s Kane and Abel, tracing (over 60 years) the lives and intersections of two men, Aditya Merchant and Kabir Khan.
As is typical with YRF products, these are slickly produced shows. Then again, there is the danger of letting the gloss take over. Khote Sikkey’s good ideas on paper, for instance, don’t translate very well. It should have been an edgy crime drama with interesting characters and glib lines, all the while taking a close look at the awful turpitude of high society. So they have moody lighting which usually works better in film than on television, the camera endlessly circles its actors with the result that crucial expressions are lost to us while the lens is working its way past an obtruding lamp, the characters are mere cardboards, and the screenplay and acting suffer from an odd self consciousness. It is wannabe stylish but, sadly, not much more.
If loose writing is a problem with Khote Sikkey, Kismat battles an issue with pacing. This is a period story and gets many things very right: the acting, the ambience and the dialogues are excellent. Viraf Phiroz Patel and Rahul Bagga are superb as the warring protagonists and there’s an attractive classiness about the series. But each episode tends to tell us more than it shows us and, smart though it is, the show needs to makes an emotional connect.
Nothing succeeds like success, it is tritely said. Certainly true of television. So, are these the shows that will galvanise the television industry out of its female orientation? No. But when the breakthrough occurs, perhaps Sony TV will get a little credit for chip-chipping away.
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Time was television viewing in India used to be a family affair. Programmes didn’t always divide viewers on lines of gender; fiction wasn’t always coloured pink or blue. It is true the Doordarshan era didn’t offer us any channels to squabble over but what we got catered very nicely to everybody. We had epic sagas, urban family dramas, adapted works of literature, historicals, mythology, fantasy, thrillers and whodunits. The men enjoyed Byomkesh Bakshi, Barrister Vinod and Karamchand but they also followed Hum Log, Buniyaad and Khandaan.
All that changed at the turn of the century. A young woman called Ekta Kapoor came up with a soap opera named Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. It was targeted at women and they embraced it with an enthusiasm that had media watchers reeling. It altered the face of television-viewing in India, it spawned a thriving industry and the daily soap became an institution. Through the decade, women came to rule television – both on it and in front of it.
There are some positive spin-offs from the emergence of the ‘Saas-Bahu’ phenomenon but there were casualties too – the first of these being diversity in our television choices. The soap is such a dominant entity that although General Entertainment Channels (GECs) struggle every now and then to throw off its yoke, they haven’t managed it. Over the past year, reality television managed to appeal to male as well as female audiences but fiction – the citadel – is still held by women.
It is against this background that we must examine Sony TV’s attempts to offer programming with a slight male skew. Their long-running CID is a popular staple; in 2007 they tried to revive Karamchand, the carrot-chomping detective we loved in the ‘80s, and they recently introduced Adalat, a Perry Mason-style courtroom drama that actor Ronit Roy carries off with aplomb. But the most distinctive programming comes as a result of Sony TV’s partnership with Yash Raj Films Television. Made for metro audiences while the rest of the industry addresses the Indian small town, oriented towards general rather than female audiences, and by actually having male-centric narratives, YRF’s offerings are determinedly different.
In the beginning of 2010, the partnership yielded four fiction shows, all different from anything on the screen at the time. If they worked, they would mark the return of variety to mainstream television. Regrettably, they were not a raging success. Romantic comedies Mahi Way and Rishta.com were good but they were half heartedly promoted and badly scheduled. As for the others, you’d imagine that it’s difficult to mess up an old fashioned good-versus-evil yarn involving various kinds of delicious supernatural powers, but fantasy thriller Seven managed to mangle it comprehensively.
This year, YRF has come up with two shows: Khote Sikkey and Kismat. The first has a Mumbai cop assembling an unusual team of crime-fighters: five high-society, small-time offenders who help him gain entry and insight into the moneyed classes. Kismat is a saga on the lines of Jeffery Archer’s Kane and Abel, tracing (over 60 years) the lives and intersections of two men, Aditya Merchant and Kabir Khan.
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| Khote Sikkey |
If loose writing is a problem with Khote Sikkey, Kismat battles an issue with pacing. This is a period story and gets many things very right: the acting, the ambience and the dialogues are excellent. Viraf Phiroz Patel and Rahul Bagga are superb as the warring protagonists and there’s an attractive classiness about the series. But each episode tends to tell us more than it shows us and, smart though it is, the show needs to makes an emotional connect.
Nothing succeeds like success, it is tritely said. Certainly true of television. So, are these the shows that will galvanise the television industry out of its female orientation? No. But when the breakthrough occurs, perhaps Sony TV will get a little credit for chip-chipping away.
