They are likely to be flubbing by trying to keep a foot each in two boats unconnected to each other -
majority-audience which the rustic track seems crafted to draw for at least part or entirety of the IPL's last phase,
and on the other hand the varied fandoms of MEIEJ the series/the lead pairing/either one of the leads.
There is nothing that would please both audience-types in this track - no reaction that would be acceptable to both and build a pleasing sub-track.
The series-audience niches would perhaps want JM to raise her voice against everything from the get-go and somehow get everyone's regard by being intransigent about rituals that will not actually affect her beyond the moment. But then, they would ideally prefer that this rustic track not happen at all. This track was never supposed to be acceptable to them.
It was likely to draw only the massive majority-audience to offset the viewership lack with IPL-competition in the timeslot, if tailored and presented in a way that audience would find appealing viewing. But the way it is being shown, it will repel them as surely as several of the backfiringly illplanned tracks pre-leap.
All this disagreeable contrary reaction of JM and her displeasure at her husband's sudden change - it should have been done in the urban scenario, and then they should have started the rustic track.
Instead, they have the bahu looking not just uncomfortable but almost snobbish in her disgust at her sasuraal.
Having arrived there with the man who - rhetoric notwithstanding - she does consider her husband, she might have looked as little cordial as possible, and restricted her full displeasure to her husband in private.
Instead, making herself look the victim and put-upon - even if it is the case - is not going to get her any sympathy from majority-audience.
Nor is her looking from the first moment disagreeable and willing to 'raise her voice' to people who have never seen her before and have neither affection or regard for her that they might consider her opinions and objections, unless those are voiced merely for the serial's "a foot in both the audience-type boats" attempt.
Raja's family accepting a bahu who - sartorially and in every way - would not be what they would consider acceptable may get them all some leeway from majority-audience. JM showing no understanding of their compromise in accepting her gains her no such.
Raja is shown to love both his wife and his family. But the reactions of the two ensure that he will not be mass-appreciated for wholly supporting his intransigent wife without consideration for his family after they compromised for his sake.
JM's characteristic gentleness, piety and traditional attitude to rituals would have ensured that she could have been shown enjoying the rituals and laughing or at least smiling since those rituals would not have been done at all unless the bahu had been accepted and welcomed.
Instead, for the idiotically unnecessary purpose of ensuring that she would conflict not just with her husband but with her entire sasuraal, she was shown reacting as if she were being tortured.
Being drenched is not a torture except when - as in today's episode - the CVs have the female lead behaving totally uncharacteristically and untraditionally about rituals simply to expand the hostile scenario of the track.
Another series ensured that the female-lead refusing to go through with a post-wedding ritual was mass-appreciated.
But that was because she went through everything but refused only when a ritual would cost her identity by changing her name.
Here, JM's very starting reaction to *everything* has been unwillingness and almost disrespectfully coldshouldering her defacto mother-in-law who has been firm but not cold to her.
It ensures that if JM says 'no' to something major, all her string of 'no' by then will have left no weight to any 'no' in situations which would actually matter.
The two situations that come to mind are -
dealing with whoever the antagonist (or antagonists) in the family is who may have been responsible for the harm to Raja,
and helping that widowed bhabhi (whose existence in this story seems to have no purpose unless to be helped by JM).
Was whoever managed the balanced writing of the past many weeks absent for the shoddy writing of today's episode?
The one necessary thing is to please the audience with at least one scene that makes one wish to see the next episode with the reassurance that further events in that next episode will be anticipatable viewing.
One may assume they have pleased neither the conservative nor fandom audiences with this episode.
The fandom audience may disapprove of the village-family (shown as discomfitingly orthodox as many in real-life) for not being modern. The mostly conservative majority-audience is likely to - yet again - disapprove of this serial's female lead, and that too for reactions that are totally uncharacteristic on her part.
Hopefully, those who gauge viewership may disapprove more of the track-planning which in its bizarre backfiring reminds of every failed track pre-leap.
Already missing the non-negative writing and track-developing of the past few weeks where every gloating and win of the antagonists was promptly balanced out at least to some extent in that episode itself, and the leads looked either victorious or happy or at least upbeat.
This episode - with the leads conflicting for no particularly sensible reason simply so that they can be shown conflicting and pugnacious, and their senseless proactive actions and reactions unlikely to garner mass-viewership - reminded of the episodes of all those miserable "leads talking big and actually uncomprehending, antagonist powerful, track negative and depressing" tracks pre-leap.
Was hoping that sort of demotivating-viewing track-planning might be a thing of the past after the PH and CVs split. Maybe not.
The only positive thing in this episode was that JM would have looked pleased - at least temporarily - and not hostile if Raja had agreed to her naively innocent insistence that he should surrender to the law for killing AK.
So the fact that she was looking displeased and hostile towards Raja was the side-effect of his not having gone along with her insistence and therefore now being - at least as of now and for that deed - not in jail.
Since he is not in jail and she is not outside finding out the hard way that the law might be even less helpful than the two officers on the night she was trying to find Raju, the nonsensical messy situation unfolding right now is comparatively rather less nightmarish.
Nothing in the episode was pleasing or reassuring.🥱 But this one thing is, in a hugely relieved 'almost saw an actual torture session yet again in jail in this series'.
Going to hold to that reminder as a worse-case scenario for some of the nonsense one may expect in the next episode.
Would be delighted to be mistaken if the next episode turns out to be nonbackfiring, well-etched and pleasing.
Hopefully Raja will take JM's advice when she is actually non-ruinously right, and not when she is naively blundering forward in blinkered confidence.
And speaking of blinkers, are the writers planning to resume the 'mass-viewership falls, track modifies and then closes' era of the idiotic male lead who can help nether himself nor his wife?
Because if they are *not*, it would be nice if they don't take too long to have the blinkers off Raja 😊 - rather than his wife playing solo detective and him disbelieving her and the villain gloating at the conflicting leads.🥱
Unfortunately, one can readily imagine the viewership-disaster of that scenario from the sort of successive failed tracks that were consecutively maintained in that framework pre-leap.
Edited by leelaa9 - 10 years ago
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