Growing up in India, specifically Tamil Nadu, I grew up with a very specific idea of what a television show (or TV serial as it was and always will be called) was supposed to be. It was often the story of an unfortunate and unnecessarily loud and dramatic family, facing more trouble and tears and betrayal and backstabbing in weeks than many families face in a lifetime. It was an everyday affair, and when I say everyday, I mean everyday for YEARS. And there were some that ran for decades (I assume, I’ve never heard of one ending). These were the 'Mega' serials. And I have a long history with them.
I remember every summer vacation (remember those?) I'd travel to Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu to spend a few weeks with my maternal grandmother. I loved these times, it sucked when it was time to leave, and I’d spend the rest of the year waiting for next year’s vacation. Everytime I visited, I’d come back to the same familiar feeling—a sense of warmth and comfort that only my grandmother could bring. Anyway, the thing is that my grandmother loved these serials. There were 8-10 serials that she’d be following every day, from 10 in the morning to around 3 in the afternoon. All the things she did around the house—cooking, folding clothes, knowing where the grandchildren are—would all be perfectly timed and neatly slotted into the ad-breaks.
Initially, I would wonder how she followed so many stories moving forward every day. Come to think of it, it all seemed almost designed as an ongoing challenge. Stories would often change time slots and then you’d have to still find a way to remap its timings in your brain. To make things more difficult, the same actors often played different characters on different serials, sometimes even across different channels. On top of this, sometimes some actor would drop out of a serial for whatever reason, and they’d suddenly just change the actor playing the character, and continue as if nothing had changed. I used to marvel at her ability to extract the stories from this web of disorienting dramas, until I slowly realised two things.
One, serial-watching was not an individual activity. There was a passionate community. It was a smaller apartment and a simpler time than now, and so most of the houses in the apartment would have their front doors open. Much of the life would spill out onto the corridors and staircase areas. I remember the bustling late-afternoon scenes outside our flat vividly—me and the gang running up the stairs and sliding down the railing (what can I say, I was a daredevil), office-going uncles leaving for work again after a lunch-and-siesta break at home, and an intense triangular conversation between my grandmother sitting at our doorstep, Ramu’s mom in the neighbouring doorway, and a third aunty pitching in from the floor below us down one flight of stairs. I realised very soon that this daily discussion was key to the story-following endeavour. This is where the scenes and storylines would be unpacked. This is where the clarifications would be made, “illae paati, andha scene ondra mani serial illae, pathu mani serial” (“no granny, that scene is not from the serial at 1.30, that’s from the serial at 10”). And most importantly, this is where the gossip about the characters is unleashed, “Avan enna pannan paatheengala!? Polladhavan!” (“did you see what he did!? Bad fellow!”). Without these discussions, the whole marathon serial watching would be one confusing process.
Two, overall the stories didn’t actually move forward that much. And you remember what I said about the serials lasting years (of course you do, I mentioned it only a few loooong paragraphs ago, now you know how it feels)? So, every year I’d visit, I found the same stories on, and I found that I had no trouble following the story, given that technically I should have missed months and months of plot development and character arcs. That’s the thing, there wasn’t much of that happening. About 65 percent of every episode (no, this is not from a peer-reviewed study, given most of my peers were also only about 8-years old) was filled with effects—sudden zooms to all the characters in the scene, different angles showing the same scene, slow-motion shots (no action, only reactions)—all set to annoyingly dramatic music. And each half-hour slot would be broken into chunks by 3-4 ad breaks. The result of all this was that each episode would barely have two-three scenes playing out before the dreaded word would appear on a frozen screen—“THODARUM” (to be continued).
Now, none of this is to take away from my grandmother’s achievement in any way. She’s almost 90 years old now, and she still follows 8-10 serials a day. I don’t think my mind will be half as sharp as hers when I’m 90. Heck, I don’t even know if it is now. The point is, she is amazing. But the serials were not.
I don’t think I’d be stretching it if I extended this statement to serials like this across India, barring a few exceptions. I don’t blame them either, they knew their audience, and they played it perfectly to them.
But the result of this was that when I started watching TV shows in English one day, I was in for a rude shock. Why is there so much happening in each episode? Why are there no replays of reactions? What if I missed something important on that character’s face—a twitch of the eye or a flare of the nose—that I absolutely should not miss? Why are the stories good? (Before you say something, I absolutely know there’s good Indian serials (maybe) and absolute garbage English shows as well (definitely)).
Now, FINALLY, we come to the topic of this piece when I started writing it (once again, now you know how it feels when it takes so long to get to the point).
I recently watched Ricky Gervais’ ‘After Life’ on Netflix. It was absolutely brilliant.
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