Now that I am home after a long time, the Hindi Television Soap Opera industry is being inflicted on me by not only my grandmother and mom, but also, I am embarrassed to say, my dad! I must admit that it possibly couldn’t get worse.
There seems to be a dearth of TV serials anyways and hence the need for each program to painfully stretch beyond its capacity to years and years of torture. Not only is the length bothersome, the content too lacks variety. There’s usually a simple theme – one unrealistically wicked person and another extremely nice person. Almost always, no one is able to identify the wicked person barring a person here and there, and no one believes this nice person (I don’t know why these serials assume that humans are so bad at judging people). Somehow or the other, the wicked character is able to get away with a lot of troublesome behaviour. As the story progresses, and the serial needs to be extended beyond its tolerable life and the wicked character cannot do more harm, usually a new wicked character is created. It also quite likely that there is a twist and the wicked character all of a sudden becomes really nice!
And one cannot forget the special effects. It started with an alternating zoom in, zoom out sequence with somehow matching strong music. Then there are B&W instances. Then there are the sequential close-ups of all the family members, usually standing in a row, for about 2-3 minutes about twice in every episode. One must not forget that most serials involve filthy rich families, living in unrealistically (am I using this word far too often?) fancy and large homes, with the women dressed in heavy jewellery all the time.
Since there are so few TV serials, each serial is forced to run 5 days a week, unlike the usual once a week scenario previously, which still continues in the US. With the need to shoot so much and limited capacity for each character, they’ve come up with various innovations. Of course, increasing advertisement time in that 30 minute period is just one of them. Add to that – recap of previous episode (very standard), a ‘what’s going to happen in the next ten minutes’ post cap before every ad break and of course, ‘what’s going to happen tomorrow’ post-cap at the end of every episode. With some many recap’s and post-cap’s, I doubt (yet to exactly time it) if each ‘30 minute’ episode has any more than 15 minutes of new shooting.
India continues to copy from the developed world – be it IPL, clothing and what not. I wish they could copy TV serials too and bring about some variety in what is being offered. Bollywood has definitely gone in the right direction. Waiting for Indian Television to do that too. Till then, I shall stick to my laptop and English sitcoms!
