Dear Hindi TV Producers, Here’s Why We Don’t Prefer Watching TV Anymore!

For any average Indian who has grown up watching TV, it takes five seconds to guess the next one month plot of any TV serial or daily soap. Or by chance, if you happen to pass by the drawing room and your mom is busy in her five-hour marathon of daily soaps, you can easily stop by and give her a predictive spoiler for the rest of the week. Indian TV has become that boring and stale!

As if reincarnations weren’t enough, love affairs with a gorilla, female lead turning into a fly, and getting pregnant by a devil almost leaves us to feel like vomiting. The number of leaps in a single serial is more than the numbers of a leap of faith we’ve all collectively taken in our lives.

And some of the seemingly promising new shows that begin with huge pomp and show to be revolutionary and educative go down the drain because of highly melodramatic daily soaps raking all the TRPs. Before TV’s couch potatoes argue here that TRPs speak for the success of such shows, let’s get one fact clear here, TV has ruined many lives, scarred a lot of childhoods because dinner was either served at 7, or after a certain climax of the top show aired on TV! We’ve all felt the pain!

Coming over to the pretentious love making scenes which can put us to shame, there are shows where weddings are aired and scripted over 3 months or more! A number of Bollywood songs that are used to accentuate the cathartic value of many over stretched sequences is unfathomable! They almost end up ruining some songs for us for life!

And accept it or not, every serial turns into a Saas Bahu serial. Every other show has an angry young man who is his mother’s captive, falls in love with a girl of a lower or upper-class home, they hate each other at the beginning and then the hate transforms into love, is a highly overused formula!

Reality shows are no better! Skin show, forced intimate scenes, boring and appalling stories are serving old biryani on a new platter. TV has lost its creativity to script a good scene! The love confessions only happen when the guy and girl are in a life or death condition, or they’re singing dancing in rain. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai camp and rain scenes have been used by almost every serial!

Actresses sleeping with jewelry and makeup on should have been buried in the 90s, but we still follow the same pattern. Bahus are still draped in a nine-yard saree, and wearing short dresses or denim are still a big deal for TV! Working bahus are always criticized and all mother-in-laws are out rightly EVIL! Every leap is about the kids brining their parents together, only to bring on more drama again!

We’re tired, we need something new, and that’s why we’ve moved on to web-series, and apps that showcase finite shows, seasons and films. They’ve become our go-to destination for entertainment, and thanks to YouTube, unlike olden times when we used to run to watch a movie trailer or song; we’ve got music apps and video streaming sites to our rescue. Even some of our favorite TV shows like Sarabhai Versus Sarabhai are back on the application based interface, and reality shows are making their way to these platforms too.

So dear producers, the day is not too far when you’ll have to dig your brains to bring back your audience! Time to rethink your scripts?