It's a tried-and-tested template - take about a dozen characters, throw a couple of oddballs in, mix in the nine emotions, set it against a Gujarati backdrop and Voila! you have a Hats Off production ready. Makers JD Majethia and Aatish Kapadia seem to have patented the joint family formula. The latest from their stable is Bure Bhi Hum Bhale Bhi Hum, a slice of life laced with light humour show for Star Plus. This time too there is a Gujarati joint family, the Popats, who run a jewellery business in Vadodara but it is divided neatly into the 'bad' and the 'good' side. Two sisters, Raseela and Susheela, one deliciously wicked and the other, a Sita-reincarnate are married to two brothers, one a shrewd miser and the other, an innocent soul. While the wicked couple has two sons (the elder one who even cons his own father), a daughter-in-law who sugarcoats the venom in her and teams up with her mother-in-law to run the 'bhala' family down and a granddaughter who has taken the bad genes too. The good family has a son and a daughter each. While the son is a self-confessed brahmachari and the ideal son/brother next door, the daughter is past her marriage age and the unofficial 'servant' of the house. Last but not the least, there is a patriarch who is hard of hearing, thinks highly of his wicked elder daughter-in-law Raseela who has carefully painted a very positive picture of herself and her family. Says Majethia, "Today's world is short of moral values and several people we find in our everyday lives who don't think twice before taking others for a ride. The wicked family too is one such bunch. But to counter them we have the good family, without whom the very foundation of a family will shake. Together they form an interesting mix of people. We also wanted to show that what goes around comes around." Ask him if all their shows share the same template and doesn't it become a disadvantage and he replies, "Either you have character-based shows or story-based ones. We have always delivered shows with strong characters. Our characters have always been memorable and managed to strike a chord. Besides, we cast multiple characters depending on the content. Tomorrow if I have a concept that requires just five people, I won't stretch it to 15." Interestingly, the cast has a couple of Marathi veterans from the theatre and television industry. Harshada Khanvilkar (known for her versatility) and Preeti Joshi (for her comic timing), both known names on the Marathi scene play the two sisters. Ashutosh Kulkarni, an upcoming Marathi actor who is also seen in Asambhav, a supernatural drama on Zee Marathi, plays the character of Jai, the good son. "Gujarati and Marathi theatres are the most active and have produced some great actors. Both these industries are rich in culture and literature. Besides when you live in Maharashtra, isn't a collaboration between these two vibrant cultures is inevitable?" asks Majethia in broken Marathi. The three actors also claim to be getting a lot of creative satisfaction working with Hats Off. "It's a reputed production house that has delivered some good work," says Kulkarni. Adds Khanvilkar, "It's a well-written character with a touch of humour, I'm enjoying playing it. Besides let's face it, the budget of a Hindi show is very high compared to a Marathi serial, though I must say that these days the Marathi shows too are not low on production values. They were rich in content anyway." This is Joshi's third show with Hats Off. "I had done Resham Dankh and Jasuben Jayantilal Joshi Ki Joint Family with them. Besides the money and the high-production values, the scripts are getting better in Hindi and you can't doubt the national reach and the exposure regional actors get. So, it' a win-win situation." While Majethia claims that the first figures of Bure Bhi Hum Bhale Bhi Hum have been satisfactory it remains to be seen whether Raseela, Susheela, Jai, Hetal and the rest of the Popat family manage to win over the audience's hearts just like Godavari Ben Thakkar's joint family of baa, bahus and the babies.
JD on why Jasuben ... wound up
"Like Colors and Star Plus, which are running their shows from Mondays to Fridays, NDTV Imagine too wants to do the same. Jasuben Jayantilal Joshi Ki Joint Family was running from Fridays to Sundays. With the Hindi films being sold to TV channels for lesser-prices, more and more big-ticket movies are being sold to multiple channels, which run them within one or two weeks of each other. Films fetch a collective viewership on a Sunday and that positively affects the GRPs of a channel, which in turns reflects positively in the TRPs. Besides in between these films, channels run the promos of their daily shows so that becomes in-built advertising. Now in such a scenario, it wouldn't have made sense to run Jasuben.. only on Saturdays.
Yes, we are not completely satisfied with how Jasuben.. fared on the channel. It came at a time when Colors had launched their Khatron Ke Khiladi and we all know how the channel affected the other shows then. Today television has become very unpredictable. What was on an upswing once is nowhere today. A show that did well two weeks ago today has a massive TRP drop. It's no longer a channel-versus-channel competition - it's one show versus the other and that's a good sign.
"It's a decent burial for Jasuben..., no sweat because apart from Ramayan it was the only show left to go off air from the first lot of shows NDTV Imagine had announced during their launch."
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