Putting the real back in reality!

I have to confess. I do have a guilty pleasure that I indulge in, and it is called Bigg Boss.”I say this out knowing that I will be judged by many, since the usual reactions to this statement of mine, when said in public are, “Yaar, how can you?”Don’t you know the show is staged?”It’s just noise and nothing else.”

Now let me admit that I am not big on TV watching, that’s something I have given up a long time ago. And I won’t be alone when I say that whenever I need to get my fix of entertainment, I just need to fire up my ipad or my laptop and voila! Content, tailor-made for me, would be available to me at the swipe of a finger. No such luck when I switch on the telly. Why then do I enjoy a show like Bigg Boss? 

Maybe it’s just a reality show which enables me to disconnect with something that’s going to keep me occupied anyway... reality itself. That’s the irony of it all! It looks too fake to be real, it is too loud to be real, the whole concept is well, unreal. And me, I am a connoisseur of all things which are so bad, they’re good! (Gunda is one of my favourite movies!)

There have been several formulae which have emerged successful on TV over the years, run their course and have died out. I remember the times of early-cable TV, around ’92-’93 and thereabouts, when Bollywood music countdown shows were a thing. Top Tens, Muqablas, you got the winners! We knew all the songs by heart, and even the dance moves. Who can forget Prabhudheva’s turn as the invisible man in the song Muqabla”or Akshay’s weird pelvic thrusts in Tu cheez badi hai mast. Heck, we used to do these jigs back in school during free period, as a showcase of our ‘talent.’Sometimes to impress some girls maybe. That clearly didn’t work though. That, my friends, is a different story altogether. 

Then came the era of quiz shows. The best of the best, the Bournvita Quiz contest, used to keep challenging our general knowledge every Sunday morning. It spawned various other such Quiz shows, including one very strange Ludo quiz contest on Doordarshan. But at least it kept us glued.

What followed these trends is something which changed Indian TV, the saas-bahus. The lesser said about it better. And along with these vamps and sisters-in-law, came the “Reality”shows. They bundled up all the talent hunts and other such shows in this category too. Back when these singing shows started airing on our channels in the ’90s, the contestants used to come on stage, sing and go. If they won, there was a great sense of achievement, but the ones who lost had a reasonably accomplished look too. At least they were on TV showing the world what they could do. Even as an audience, we used to feel the tension, the sorrow, the anguish. 

Not anymore. Now, if I mistakenly commit the crime of channel surfing, all I see is contestants weeping, crying, wailing, so much that they’’d give Nirupa Roy a stiff competition in the most-tears-shed category. 

Even worse are the kids’talent shows. I understand the need to provide the show as a platform, but seriously guys, we zoom into the crying kid’s face after he or she has lost? Take that for reality! More like exploitation.  

What is real? Are tears, fights and cussing reality today? What about values such as sportsmanship and grace? When was the last time we saw something like a sporting defeat or a non-emotional-blackmail victory? A leading show where people answer questions to become millionaires too has gone down this path. Gone are the days a family used to sit together with a faux-aspiration of becoming an imaginary millionaire, watching the show and answering the questions. Now it’s about ‘let’s feature an individual with some tragic story and see the TRPs go up’. 

Music shows are about how a contestant has overcome poverty or a handicap, and how the judges weep, that too in slow motion, with a super zoomed-in camera, capturing their rolling tears in high definition. 

Other channels air younger” shows, where the daftest selection of 20-somethings is made to do some pretty brainless stunts and on top of that talk about their ambitions.”Guys, please read a book. Why see yourselves doing this? They even go ahead and call themselves “Reality Show Stars. I can’t forget this show in the early 2000s called Item-Bomb. This was a reality show’where they auditioned girls for item numbers. Nuff said.
In the days of Netflix and other streaming avenues, I miss the retro TV shows, most of them on Doordarshan! Can’t we just get the meaningful stuff back on TV? Can music shows revert back to what they actually stood for? Good music and finding talent.

Can we just not create a fake reality to sell on TV in the name of reality shows? 

Sigh, that’s enough food for thought. I’m almost rushing to end this write up right here, cause guess what? The Boss starts in 3 minutes!  

(The writer is a comic creator, illustrator and animator)