A story for every screen

The evolution from theatres to television to streaming platforms has transformed content consumption and the reach and popularity of many filmmakers

Hansal Mehta and Mrunmayee Lagoo Waikul’s Netflix series Scoop, based on Jigna Vora’s memoir Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison, is a fantastic watch. Ms Vora, who was the deputy bureau chief with The Asian Age at that time, was wrongly implicated in the 2011 murder of Mid-Day’s crime reporter Jyotirmoy Dey (or J Dey). She got bail after nine months of imprisonment and was acquitted in 2018. Scoop has been among the top 10 shows on Netflix in India since its release on June 2. Mr Mehta’s previous work Scam 1992 (2020), based on the Harshad Mehta scam, was a huge success that helped revive the fortunes of the then-struggling SonyLIV. His next one, Scam 2003:The Telgi Story, is due for release this September on SonyLIV. Judging by online chatter, audiences await it with bated breath. It is safe to say that Mr Mehta is one of the hottest directors in the OTT space.

Mr Mehta has been around for long. He’s done TV shows such as Amrita (1994) and Dooriyan (1999). Many of his films, Aligarh (2015), Shahid (2012) and Citylights (2014), have won praise and awards but never the kind of popularity that Scam 1992 and Scoop have brought. More people have heard of Mr Mehta now than when he was making full-length feature films.

This brings us to the point of this column. Whenever a show is a hit, the media chatter is about how OTT is so wonderful, how Bollywood is disappointing, and TV just has “nothing to watch”. Incidentally, TV still has twice the viewership of streaming video, but that is beside the point.

The people and production houses that make “content” for film and TV are the same ones that make content for streaming. What differs is the screen on which we watch that content and its business dynamics.

Until the 1970s, the dominant screen was the big one in theatres. In the ’80s and ’90s, the double whammy of piracy and high taxation put the filmmakers in a weird place. Not all wanted to make films that could fill 1,000-seater giant theatres. Many, such as Mrinal Sen or Hrishikesh Mukherjee, simply had small intimate stories to tell. But there was no platform for them to tell these stories. The economics of the business demanded a blockbuster that would fill the large theatres for weeks on end. With the advent of television in the 1980s, the state-controlled Doordarshan gave them a way of reaching audiences. When private satellite television came in the early ’90s, there were even more options for these filmmakers to tell their stories and yet make a living. It changed the nature of storytelling. Soon TV became a much larger business (currently four times the revenue of films) which drove the “content factories”.

Think about it. Saeed Mirza made the critically acclaimed Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho (1984) and Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (1980) among other films. But we remember him more for his TV show Nukkad (1987). Shyam Benegal’s body of work is phenomenal —Ankur, Mandi, Manthan, Bhumika. But he was really discovered by the masses when Bharat Ek Khoj, based on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s book, Discovery of India, started airing on Doordarshan in 1988. You can imagine how popular Mr Benegal’s signature films might have been if we had evolved to streaming back then. His films had a language that the OTT viewer of today would assimilate and enjoy easily.

On the other hand, filmmakers such as Manmohan Desai (Amar Akbar Anthony, Naseeb) or Yash Chopra (Daag, Waqt, Darr et al) found success and popularity on the big screen and that worked for them.

However, private television never realised its initial promise of reaching diverse audiences with different types of content. That needed pay TV a la HBO, which is responsible for some of the most cutting-edge shows in America (Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Succession). In India, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) began regulating the price of television channels in 2004 to calm the cable wars. It still does it. Almost two decades of price regulation have killed any innovation in storytelling that satellite television showed in its early years. It is now largely an ad-dependent (albeit profitable) screen that makes money by trying to reach the largest mass of people much like single screens in the 1980s.

At the turn of the century came another screen. Multiplexes brought audiences back to the theatres. In the process the “multiplex” film was born. Think of Dil Chahta Hai (2001) or Delhi Belly (2011) both urban hits even while Sooraj Barjatya’s blockbuster Vivaah (2006) was largely watched in small-town India. Screens increased, different markets were being served and money was coming back into the system promoting a whole new generation of storytellers such as Vikramaditya Motwane (Udaan, Lootera), Sriram Raghavan (Johnny Gaddar, Andhadhun, Badlapur) and many others. But high rentals and multiple permissions meant that multiplexes remained somewhat high-end and didn’t spread as fast as they could have.

In 2008 came YouTube. From 2016 onwards came the deluge of streaming services. While theatres force us to get out and drop everything to watch a story unfold, streaming allows us to shift everything —meals, office, sleep — in order to watch whatever we want from across the world. There is no distribution barrier, no censorship and no price control on streaming. Imagine if Trai had said Netflix couldn’t be priced at more than ~19 or that it could only be sold to Airtel subscribers.

Streaming, in fact, liberated broadcasters too — creatively and on product offering. Some of the most popular OTTs, Disney+Hotstar (Disney), SonyLIV (Sony) and Zee5 (Zee), are operated by broadcasters. Every storyteller finally finds the screen that works best for him. It is simply a matter of where the screen, the ecosystem and the audience stand on the evolutionary path.

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