Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Harry and Meghan-the ultimate Reality TV Show?

This week’s Malavika’s Mumbaistan brings to you the inevitable blurring of genres… After all, who doesn’t want to be a voyeur at someone else’s humiliating love life or lack of it - among other things?

Come, let us fashion a reality TV show out of absolutely nothing: thin air, a handful of spurious celebrities and many long shots of the Sea Link (Bandra side).

Matchmaking shows combine the pinnacle components on which the reality TV show is predicated: healthy frissons of uncertainty and competition and a feel-good factor for viewers who witness the humiliation and exploitation of its participants (HT Illustration)

Seriously, you don’t need much to produce such a show. Just a handful of middle-aged Mumbai women with fictitious careers, a tenuous link to Bollywood, gym-toned abs and a wardrobe full of designer- wear, which they are only too happy to shed, at the drop of a hat.

A hint of notoriety and scandal helps of course, but it can always be manufactured as the show progresses.

Also, a walk-on pet, a rumoured boyfriend or some past trauma (often they are the same thing) will help drive the (wafer thin) so-called ‘plot line’ of your show.

As will the notion that it is offering hapless viewers across the length and breadth of the land (and particularly in small B, C and D towns) an inside view of how the rich and famous behave behind closed doors and when the cameras are off.

Depending on the artfulness of your execution, hapless viewers will be convinced that they are guests in the living rooms of the rich and famous. All the way from Juhu to Bandra. They will also somehow and miraculously forget the existence of the three hidden cameras, the zillion microphones and the armies of make-up artists and hair stylists and designers employed to pull off the show and swallow every scene and dialogue as if it is 100% the real thing.

Which means they are even more hapless than you’d suspected. But that’s the nature of the reality game: The viewers suspend belief; you suspend all standards of storytelling and TV production and everyone is happy.

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OK, if the genre of reality shows based on Bandra vagaries is getting too crowded, let us do a match-making show. That’s bound to grab eyeballs. After all, who doesn’t want to be a voyeur at someone else’s humiliating love life or lack of it?

Here, you don’t even need middle-aged women with tenuous connections to Bollywood or gym-toned abs etc.

Just one impossibly razor-sharp aunty with a faux designer clutch and a sharp eye for the bottom line, who has no qualms whatsoever in zooming onto the insecurities and vulnerabilities of a host of singles, desperate enough to put themselves through not only her vinegary examination but simultaneously that of millions of other strangers, gobsmacked at the banquet of intimate details they are privy to.

Matchmaking shows combine the pinnacle components on which the reality TV show is predicated: healthy frissons of uncertainty and competition and a feel-good factor for viewers who witness the humiliation and exploitation of its participants.

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Of course, if the genre for a matchmaking show seems a little bit ‘ been there done that, how about going for the original, no-holds-barred reality TV show format that started the ball rolling in the first place?

Here, all you have to do is round up a bunch of loonies (people with delinquencies, addictions, crime records etc.) or a family of peerless exhibitionists and record their every move and utterance, the way you would an ant hill in a science lab.

This genre has proven to be so successful that it is believed there isn’t a corner of the world where some form of it isn’t being watched by some lonely, goggle-eyed bored soul, too far gone to tear their eyes off their screens and live a life of their own.

In addition, this kind of Looney tunes/Dysfunctional Family chronicles can make instant celebrities and billionaires out of some very ordinary people, in addition to becoming handy catalogues for cosmetic surgery procedures, as the participants change their appearances completely and astonishingly during the show.

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But wait, if all this seems so ho-hum and last decade-why not cash in on the latest reality TV show trend that’s currently capturing the world’s attention?

For this, all you need is a Prince and a Princess with a canny understanding of their best camera angles and an axe to grind as big as a continent.

Of course, it might not completely meet the requirements of the reality TV show genre, which is for ‘unscripted’ storytelling, but hey -who believed that old trope anyway?

After all in a world where every single person with a social media platform is busy scripting the narratives of their own lives, on a second-to-second basis and passing it off as their real lives, and no one can eat a meal, board a flight, enter a party or entertain a single thought without broadcasting it to the entire world, isn’t all of social media nothing more than a humongous reality show at the end of the day?

So, Netflix might call it a ‘docu series’, but what else is ‘Harry and Meghan’ if not an epic Reality TV show, complete with vicarious thrills, a ringside view of the rich and famous, and a frisson of competition (who comes off better the Royals or the Prodigals?).

(A portion of the Lives of the Rich and Famous, a sprinkling of Big Brother, a shaving of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and even a slice of Real Housewives…)

It was a show waiting to happen and does anyone doubt that there will be more in this genre to come?

(Even as we speak, there are reports that Donald, Melania, Ivanka and Co are priming for their upcoming offering…)

As for Musk, well, he doesn’t even need a shoot or show: he’s currently starring in his own (epic) reality TV show, 24X7 and for world viewership: it’s called ‘Twitter’.