Are the TV soap operas invading our living rooms every evening, feeding off our latent negative human emotions ?
At least that’s what Kerala High Court Judge B. Kemal Pasha affirmed when he called for a mechanism to censor those too, just like the movies.
Noted writer Sara Joseph backed the jurist.
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“Serials play a big role in creating a wretched society. They propagate questionable values and portray women in the worst possible manner. Women who commit heinous acts and plot to kill people are beamed into our drawing room relentlessly,” she said.
Ms. Joseph also found fault with serials for portraying a retrograde man-woman relation and bringing back a lot of bad vibes, including of communalism.
Actor and producer of several quality serials Prem Prakash was not sure about censorship, but said he fully agreed with the sentiment expressed by the judge.
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“There should be self-regulation on the part of serial writers and directors, since their work is watched by the entire family. The deplorable state of many serials is saddening. Many of them have an overdose of violence and revenge scenes, which send out wrong signals,” he said.
Senior psychologist C.J. John has detected signs suggestive of serial stereotypes in family conflicts. “Evil and wicked themes have an upper hand over goodness in serials. In danger are vulnerable sections like lonely elders and the emotionally estranged. They identify with characters shown in the serials and misjudge human relations around them. The competition seems to be in making serials more melodramatic and farthest from reality,” he said.
Mr. John, however, was not a believer in censorship, which he said was an unscientific exercise in the country.
Popular television director K.K. Rajeev who is known for his realistic family dramas batted for some degree of discipline when it comes to serials as the situation seems to be ‘uncontrolled.’ “There is nothing wrong in fictionalising human relations. But there now seems to be a forceful attempt at formulising it.
For instance, now the trend is to show children being tortured, to evoke sentiments. The competition among channels means that when something has clicked in one channel, their competitor follows suit,” he said.
Sreekantan Nair who heads Flowers channel was against censorship since history was replete with incidents where it had led to suppression.
Instead, television channels should observe self-restraint in keeping with their social commitment as an educative medium.
“Serials do influence, but these days news channels air more dangerous content. That news channels in Kerala have almost double the viewership of the national average of 8 per cent has to do with the fact that they air more juicy content than even entertainment channels,” he said, hinting at the recent real life CD-chasing drama, related to the solar scam.
But he did admit that serials, owing to their addictive nature, were an easy way to enhance the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) television rating, which was central to the financial stability of channels.