Guess what happens when soaps get slippery (that’s when TRPs fall)? Channels devise innovative ways of introducing new shows and attaching fancy tags to them.
Thus, the latest product from Ekta Kapoor’s soap factory isn’t quite a saas-bahu saga, nor does it have a demure Indian woman as chief protagonist. Instead, Kapoor has chosen to show how three childhood friends (Rituraj, Vikram Kapadia and Aly Khan) react when their troubled pasts come to haunt them in K. Street Pali Hill (Star Plus). In case you see happy family postcards in the show, that’s incidental: “men also have families, but for a change I’ve trained the arc-lights
on them.”
But do men ever watch television soaps in India?
Of course they do, says Sameer Nair, COO, Star TV: “Although men like to think of themselves as macho, they don’t mind watching soaps. I’ve myself checked out late-night soaps on other channels out of sheer curiosity and think there’s not enough designed for men.”
“It would be tough to think of a soap only with male characters. We tried something like that in Jeet (Star Plus). It was shot from the male point of view but the TRPs were so pathetic that it had to be pulled off air,” recalls producer Shristi Arya.
Shekhar Suman, who’s played lead roles in soaps from a man’s point of view in Andaaz on Zee and Main (Star Plus), says it would be interesting if there were more shows where men played central characters. “But fiction shows tend to cater more to women, because they spend more time watching TV.”
According to the last Nielsen survey, 25.8 per cent men (aged 18-24) watched TV every day in the US as compared to the 24 per cent last year. For Mohnish Behl, who plays the male lead in Sanjivani (Star Plus) & Devi (Sony), “soaps about men might have novelty value, but, in the end, it is all about telling the story well.” It’s also about getting TRPs!