First, the exceptions. The finale of the first season of TVF’s mini-series Pitchers wrapped up last month here. Telling the story of four young men looking for funding for their start-up – a hot button if there was one – it has not only proved successful, but also set up the possibility of making a business out of an experiment.
With a ranking of 28 in IMDb’s List of Top 250 TV Shows, riding on a meta-score of 9.7/10, Pitchers has broken new ground for Indian shows. Unfortunately, there haven’t been too many other big successes yet, unless you count Baked, a ScoopWhoop original web series following the misadventures of three Delhi University students.
But what this has done is to get a whole lot of other players into the act of creating video content for the web as an alternative to television. Sony Entertainment’s video-on-demand service called Sony Liv premiered its first web-series, #LoveBytes ten days ago.
Lacking in substance, the series tries to hold with the affable camera-friendly faces of its known telly-stars. It’s a sluggish start but we’ll have to wait and watch. Running less than 10 minutes per episode, it may not hurt to skip it right now.
In 2010, when Delhi based Pratik Arora filmed his mockumentary web series Company Bahadur in his dad’s office with a budget of Rs 5,000 per episode, he sought inspiration from international TV series, The Office.
He created Company Bahadur satirising office culture, something that web users would immediately catch on to in their lunch breaks and around water-cooler chatter.
But Company Bahadur is clumsily crafted, even if the humour is droll. Poorly acted, poorly produced, it’s an artefact of a time when web content was still birthing. The laughs are sometimes intended, but often unintentionally funny.
Going into history, and into the South, it was in 2008 that Rediff and the Chennai-based PixelKraft had launched India’s first web-com, titled Ram And Ria.
The three-minute skits, performed by a young, married couple showcases their tiffs and affections just as #LoveBytes hitches it up North. Ram And Ria was a precursor to the slickly produced series we have now.
Everyone wants a piece of the pie at the moment. Jumping into the fray are big players like Eros International, which has announced that it is co-producing an Indian adaptation of a popular international sitcom with actor Anil Kapoor’s production house. No names have been divulged yet.
The platform is booming but isn’t as if there weren’t any initial hiccups.
Television soap queen Ekta Kapoor saw the opportunity in 2010 when Balaji Telefilms came up with their first web series Bol Niti Bol about a young girl chronicling her life through a video diary. Ironically, the only episode of the series that got a little over two lakh views was titled, Why girls can’t watch a porn movie?