Soaps for Men

For a while now, Sony TV has been coming up with glossy, smart serials that pander to the male couch potato

Time was when television viewing in India used to be a family affair. Programmes didn’t always divide viewers along lines of gender; fiction wasn’t always either pink or blue. It is true the Doordarshan era didn’t offer any channel to squabble over, but what was broadcast was for everybody. We had epic sagas, urban family dramas, adapted works of literature, historicals, mythology, fantasy, thrillers and whodunnits. The men enjoyed Byomkesh Bakshi, Barrister Vinod and Karamchand, but also followed Hum Log, Buniyaad and Khandaan.

All that changed at the turn of the century when a young woman called Ekta Kapoor came up with a soap opera called Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thhi. It was targeted at women and they embraced it with an enthusiasm that had media watchers reeling. Through the decade, women came to rule television—both on it and in front of it.

Over the past couple of years, 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 small-town India, oriented towards general rather than female audiences, and by actually having male-centric narratives, YRF Television’s offerings are determinedly different.

In the beginning of 2010, the partnership yielded four fiction shows, all different from anything on screen at the time. If they worked, they would mark the return of variety to mainstream television. Regrettably, they were not a raging success. The 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 high society. Kismat is a saga on the lines of Jeffery Archer’s Kane and Abel, tracing (over 60 years) the lives of two men, Aditya Merchant and Kabir Khan, and what links them.

As is typical of YRF products, these are slickly produced. But Khote Sikkey’s good ideas on paper don’t translate very well. It should have been an edgy crime drama with interesting characters and glib lines. But the characters turn out to be mere cardboards, and the screenplay and acting suffer from an odd self consciousness. Wannabe stylish it is, but sadly, not much more.

Kismat is a period story and gets many things just right: the acting, the ambience and the dialogues are excellent. Viraf Phiroz Patel and Rahul Bagga are superb as the warring protagonists. 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, will these shows galvanise the industry out of its near total female orientation? No. But when the breakthrough occurs, perhaps Sony TV will get some credit for the shift.

couch potatomaleSony TV