Soap operas, or ‘serials’ as we like to call them in India, seem to evoke a spectrum of emotions ranging from uncritical adulation to outright condemnation. In the popular imagination, serials are mainly meant to entertain and nothing more. According to this school of entertainment-lovers, if serials demand a “willing suspension of disbelief” (from the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and that too for extended times and in unintended ways, so be it.
The one thing nobody can deny is that TV serials are immensely popular. After watching a couple of them, I was forced to introspect on certain aspects of their structure and scripts.
As cinema, the small screen serials are also artistic productions even if the soap opera producers have no illusions about consciously creating art. The question is if a serial is primarily an entertainer, should it have the licence to mutilate the written and unwritten canons of artistic endeavour?
A story has to have a beginning and an end, right? Our serial producers seem to think otherwise. The soaps never seem to end. The script-writers try to stretch the story by introducing sub-plots and new characters from time to time. Sometimes the TV channels are forced to take out the serials when viewers begin to flee after getting bored over the protracted and seemingly endless storyline.
The longer the lifespan of the serial, the shorter is its appeal and artistic credibility. Our notions of plausibility are made to stand on their head with the infusion of new sub-plots and characters that disappear after some time. For the viewers, the exercise of having to willingly suspend their disbelief becomes burdensome. A change of heart is common among humans. But some of the mega-serials take extreme liberties with artistic fidelity. The viewers feel that they have been taken for a ride when a character exhibits a 360-degree metamorphosis that defies logic and runs against the thread of the storyline. Even those without a keen aesthetic sense can quickly detect the jarring dichotomy between the possible and the probable.
The soaps have taken gender empowerment and equality to unseen heights. It appears that the male monopolisation of villainy has upset serial producers. Welcome the new tribe of lady villains who are as scheming and ruthless as their male counterparts. They hire goons to attack, maim and kill their perceived enemies at the drop of a hat.
Some female plotters even knife their opponents to death and boast about their ghastly deeds without any pangs of remorse.
One suspects that a streak of misogyny underpins such exaggerated and criminalised portrayals of female cruelty. Perhaps it is a realistic way to mainstream women as an integral part of a corrupt and consumerist society where cultural values such as gentleness and patience that we typically associate with ladies have lost their appeal. The innocent damsels, submissive wives, and gentle ladies who walked the black and white cinema landscape of the 1950s and 1960s have disappeared.
Serial-makers say we are not supposed to take their productions seriously. After all, they are giving what people want. Can we just shrug off this argument? Cinema is a short-form art that entertains us for about three hours and has to get past the censors’ scrutiny before being allowed to be shown to the public. Soap operas face no such restraints. They provide stimuli that bombard viewers for extended periods: these last for years.
Distorted caricatures that revel in normalising the abnormal and glorifying violent behaviour send wrong signals to impressionable minds. The casual way in which characters in the serials cry for blood, sends shivers down our spines. It trivialises human life, making it appear expendable.
There is no tension between artistic freedom and social commitment. Serial-makers, take note that art cannot exist in a vacuum. No medium touches the people without leaving behind trails of impressions and cues that get imprinted in minds. It is not impossible to mirror the darker side of life without apotheosising immorality and criminality. Reality lends itself to sensitive depictions without the need to dress it up with a dash of the macabre. There is no such thing as pure entertainment.
vnmukund@gmail.com
