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Every time I visit India, my parents are watching a new Tamil soap that looks exactly the same as the previous one afaict. It's always a story about an extended family that stands around saying apparently shocking things to each other, eliciting dramatic reaction shots.
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I can follow along just well enough to tell that it's always utterly tedious interpersonal drama and intrigue among people who apparently have no real lives.
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These things go on for hundreds of episodes, but air multiple times a week, so they wrap in a few years. Cheap to produce. You just need a house and a bunch of people capable of overacting and over-reacting. Occasional slaps and shit.
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Hindi is the same, but I'm glad they don't watch Hindi ones because I'd understand too well to be able to tune it out. Tamil is just tough enough for me if I turn on my computer it turns into background noise.
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Similar to Mexican telenovelas I think, though from what little I've sampled, those tend to have more sex and violence. I've also watched some Korean, and those are the only ones I've actually liked. I think because they tend to be workplace-based.
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I think this stuff is like 90% of the fiction programming on Indian TV. When I was growing up in the 80s, it wasn't so dominant. There were other kinds of shows like detective, law, medical etc. Sitcoms still seem to be around but look much worse.
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That's the free market for you. When you have endless bandwidth to fill, you make do with the laziest shit you can.
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The BBC manages to do that too... Doctor Who is very well done low-budget sci-fi after all. Daleks are like trash cans with a whisk and plunger attached.
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Their funding doesn’t rely on advertising the same way so they can cater to a more niche audience maybe. I remember when ads were far fewer on state tv in India too. Having programming be interrupted for ads was a major milestone in the 90s
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It does! There was so much edifying programming in the 1980s, award winning films etc NHK apparently creates programming with their core audience, the elderly, in mind. Shows that celebrate quiet everyday lives in small towns. nhk.or.jp/archives/kaiso
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The alternative theory is that pre 91 Indian TV was catering to the rich or educated middle class. But now the dominant Tamil channel TV viewer is the small town housewife since the rich/educated/middle/urban class is watching Western TV. Producers are just maximizing ROI. Wdyt?
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I recall a COIN era story of US troops wiring up an Afghan village to have a television and being broadcast was a Pakistani or Indian soap dubbed into Pashto or Dari causing an old man to shake his fist & say “See? See? everywhere it is the mother-in-law!”
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Mark Fisher wrote about this wrt the BBC. it was surprising to see a political leftist tout the aesthetic value of what he called a cultural 'aristocracy'. his argument was that giving the people what they want results in media for an audience of the lowest common denominator