TRPs = Serial Killers
As a viewer of the serials on Indian TV, I have come to realize that the concepts of shows on the Indian telly need some drastic changes. In India, the success of a TV show depends on the dreaded word - TRPs. If the TRPs are good, the show runs on for years with twists and turns and deaths and rebirths! 😲 Never mind if the story line is crap with a lot of connived impossible situations! If a woman is tortured by her husband, in-laws, and society, the audience laps it up, the TRPs go through the roof, and of course, the show goes on and on dishing out more torture. 🤢 If the girls wear skimpy clothes and the boys bare muscles and a lot of bad language used, well, it clicks with the youth and is a roaring success! 😉
What if the story stays simple and everyday kind with situations one might encounter in real life with lessons on how to deal with such situations? It is considered low profile and not worth the trouble! Many a show starts off with such promises and viewers like me who want to watch something sensible get hooked to the show. But down the road, we notice strange things happening - the story takes a sudden U turn, unsavory and unwanted characters appear from nowhere, and the original flavor is lost. 😕 Why does this happen? Because the TRPs are low and the channel sends warnings to the producers and creatives of the show to add masala to increase TRPs or else! 😲 But does it really do any good? No, because the original fans are disgusted and give up on the show and it fails to attract new viewers half way through the story! The TRPs dip even lower and finally the show is laid to rest with a hotch-potch ending which leaves many a fan in tears! 😭
It is high time that entertainment industry thought of entertaining all kinds of viewers, not just the kinds who want melodrama and bloodshed and twisted storylines! 😛 While I agree that we watch TV for relaxation, it is also an important media which reaches almost every household in the country and it should be used for raising the awareness of the public towards certain social evils! So along with the laughter programs and certain reality shows (but which ones really educate nowadays? ), we also need good stories to be told in a convincing way. Stories are told to little children to impress certain morals on them; in a similar way, good stories need to be told on a media like the television to impart certain lessons to the viewing public.
Considering TRPs as a measure of success (I fail to understand how a miniscule percentage of households are representative of the nation's voice in an overpopulated one like ours ), many a good story bites the dust without making an impact. The best way to beat this system would be to change the strategy altogether. Let us have stories which are drawn up and fixed right at the beginning of the show. Let us have short serials, which run only for a few months – the shelf life of a serial should not be greater than 6 months. This would avoid a lot of heartache for the fans, as the story is fixed and so are the characters, and the Damocles sword of TRPs need not be hanging over the show deciding its fate. 😃 New characters and twists and turns need not be added midway through the show for garnering TRPs. Once it is known that the show is for a fixed period of time, TRPs would lose their importance, and good stories can be shown without worries. All kinds of stories can also be shown and audience can pick and choose what they want to see. This way all kinds of viewers would find something to satisfy them and the popularity of TV as a media would only go up and so would its importance in influencing the society! 😊
In fact one of the best serials I have watched was Avicharitham (The Unexpected), a Malayalam serial directed by K.K. Rajeev and having just 40 episodes of an hour each. 👍🏼 It had 4 central characters with a few ancillary ones, and I remember being glued to Asianet every evening when it was aired in 2004/2005. The serial highlighted human frailties and the unexpected climax at the end restored one's faith in human nature. 😊 I remember it won many awards, but I wonder how it fared in popularity, but it was one of the best I have watched on the telly! 👏
It is high time that the powers that be of showbiz considered the viewpoints of the audience who watch their shows and put a different kind of system in place for customer satisfaction.Short serials with a fixed storyline right at the beginning would spare a lot of heartache for fans and viewers who mourn the untimely death of their favorite shows at the altar of the TRPs! 😊
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