“That’s what she said”, “Winter is Coming”, “Bazinga!”, “How you doin”, “I am the danger” (the list might be endless), if all these timeless quotes/dialogues/catchphrases make you reminisce your favourite TV series and in turn make you hit the brick wall of nostalgia, it means that these shows have deeply impacted your lives in one way or another. Most of us would be humming their opening sequences–from “so no one told you life was gonna be this way” to “da-da-da-da-da..” to “Our whole universe was in a hot dense state”, we have memorized the dialogues, been personally invested with characters and grown individually with them. But there is one astonishing peculiarity in the above example, forget any dialogue, nobody would be remembering an Indian TV show in the last decade that might have stuck with us.
Prime-time television in India is not really known for sensible content, especially the soap operas. Switching on the telly and sitting through one “saas-bahu” serial after another is the newest form of torture that one can put oneself through and UN should be mulling over banning it in addition to disemboweling Imran Khan, who after giving such a superficial, farce and fake speech at the UNGA would become an idol foil for Simar in her escapades (Imran’s a handsome guy and we are betting, he’d be a hot pick)
Indian soap operas are often overly-melodramatic and exaggerate matters outrageously where Simar sometimes by a witch’s curse turns into a house-fly and in the very next episode operates on his husband in the operation theatre side-lining the doctor whose acting is so pathetic that you might be pulling your hair out of sheer cringiness. Since Indian Television moved on from its Doordarshan days where the shows were class apart in themselves with the likes of Malgudi Days, Fauji, Tamas, etc. reaching new scales in storytelling. But since then, everything has gone down the drain when the private players forayed into the scene and have been churning off the same-old run-off-the-mill potboilers adorned with the clichés.
15 of the 25 minutes of an Indian daily show are spent on highlighting the exaggerated emotions on the characters’ faces which are covered in the make up to make them look eye candy, zooming in and out on the vivid jewelry every woman is adorned with, giving multiple angles to indicate the character’s astonishment or bewilderment. Though billed as “family shows”, most denigrate typical “family values” that would be universal in any culture and it is very damaging to Indian society and our ethos. Extramarital affair, petty brawls between wife and the mother-in-law, the vamp of the show, all shimmery with jewelry and make-up continuously side-eyeing the protagonist, talking to herself making mind-numbingly stupid plans and executing them with sheer dedication and aplomb, one sibling trying to sabotage the other, keep all these points and you just might have booked yourself a spot in the prime TV channel for at least a decade, Oh! and do not forget the reincarnation part, we all have grown up seeing Tulsi and Akash, the days when we used to be invested in Tulsi’s day-to-day life. Simpler times, folks!
On the contrary, the various themes explored by American shows include friendship, science-comedy, medical drama, legal drama, crime-romance, science fiction drama, criminal-drama etc. which makes up for a large assorted menu where the viewer can pick anything suiting and resonating to their tastes. It is not that the youth is against the Indian TV soaps culture, or they are innately imitating the western culture, it is just that they do not have the requisite content available in the vernacular to consume, it is very limited and consequently, they are forced to foray into the foreign lands.
There’s also a rationale behind why such pathetic shows are churned out year-in and out. No show can survive on low TRP’s and the Indian audience is a little hypocrite, meaning they always criticize the quality of Indian shows yet feed on the garbage of soap operas and when a good show is telecasted, it does not garner the TRP’s, simply because it is not watched and therefore it makes the producers stick to the conventional cash-cow saas-bahu drama.
The new age OTT platforms having a plethora of content and shows that have been brilliantly conceived and made with sensible plots have caught the attention of the modern Indian audience. Series like Flames, The Family Man, Pitchers, Little Things, Tripling, Permanent Roommates, Aam Aadmi Family, etc., have tasted incredible success and if nothing it does rekindle our faith in the Indian TV-series eco-system that all is not lost and we have the talent and skills to come up with such fine quality shows. We sincerely hope that the producers and big production houses of soap operas take a leaf out of these shows and try to depict stories that are near and real to the people, rather than constraining themselves to the shimmery of saas-bahu drama.