Give TV a chance...

satellite television came to india when i was around six years old and it changed my life. it became trusted friend and companion to a shy,introverted boy who was not much of a sportsman nor a voracious reader...it became almost like the fifth member of my family. to a large extent, television defined me...my interests, my beliefs, my influences. without television i might not have been a sports fan at all (like others in my family) leave alone a keen follower of sports like golf and baseball, my passion for international politics comes from having spent hours watching cnn but most of all, it spawned a great love for english television shows(due to the place i grew up in and the school that i went to i never really got into hindi television which might be just as well) which finally brings me to the point of this post.

A few days ago, the show Desperate Housewives premiered. It is the most hyped english show ever in india and justifiably so. it was charming and interesting and quite entertaining. i would however like to talk about something that happened the day before housewives premiered. another show premiered on the same channel with so little publicity that i found out about it merely a few hours before it aired (the exact same thing had happened when the West Wing premiered a few years back). The show's name is Arrested Development. It won the emmy award last year for best comedy. this is how Star World treats it. Unfortunately, this is the rule rather than the exception,which brings me to the two reasons why english television has failed to take off in india-lack of audience and attitude of the channels. unbelievably, the people who are supposed to make money from these shows are the ones who more often than not, ruin them. many would be surprised to know that a few years back Zee Cafe(then Zee English)
had the three best shows on television-the Sopranos, the West Wing and Six Feet Under. the reason you would be surprised would be that the channel never bothered to tell you about them. AXN axed the most influential show of our generation-Survivor because a bunch of unemployed "nature-lovers" objected to scenes of people eating bugs. Star World prefers advertising ninth reruns of a rather mediocre show (Friends) than telling us about shows like the Office.

However, worse than this is the attitude of the public.i am not talking about people who are not comfortable with english or anything like that. i am talking primarily about the urban youth...people who grew up speaking english, people like myself.When i ask many of my friends which shows they watch, half say they do not watch television, the rest say Friends full stop. When i ask them why, the same old reasons come up-no time,i prefer new movies or books or music,tv shows are stupid. at this, i stare at them with incredulity...do they not realize that the great artistic thrust of our time is not in movies(going through a dark age) or music(most people i know listen to bands from the 60s) or literature(harry potter is considered the great literary achievement of our time)...it is in television. i have seen both the Godfather and Goodfellas and find the Sopranos a better portrayal of the mob, the West Wing is the best political drama to come out of any medium in ages and though reality tv might be slightly voyeuristic and exploitative, it is truly on the cutting edge redefining the meaning of entertainment .okay,it is difficult to watch repeatedly week after week but the emotional payoff is also much greater...i can still recall the unmatched exhilaration after watching the finale of the first Survivor,the tears that came down my eyes when Kevin Arnold's wonder years ended,the sorrow and sympathy i felt for Tony Soprano when he killed his best friend, and the regret i still feel for having missed the final chapter in Mulder and Scully's unforgettable odyssey.when i look at others who missed out on these moments, i feel a bit sorry for them but i mostly hope that they will shake off their biases and give tv a chance