By: Yohan P Chawla
Viacom18 has created content which provokes new thinking and inspires social change, through television shows such as Balika Vadhu and Uttaran on COLORS or the Akshay Kumar starrer Bollywood film Toilet Ek Prem Katha. Of course, it needs to be shy pushing social messages, however important, at the cost of entertainment.
COLORS has already made a science of achieving this difficult mix, considering the success of all the three elements named above.
And now, its smaller sibling, the Hindi GEC Rishtey, is making a similar attempt, for which Viacom18 has partnered with the philanthropic organization Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with BBC Media Action, to create a GEC fiction series called Navrangi Re! with an underlying behaviour change message on sanitation.
Set in a lively mohalla (neighbourhood) in a town in Northern India, Navrangi Re! promises to be high in drama, wit and satire. It has been planned as a finite series of 26 episodes that will begin airing from 02 February, 2019, on the weekends, ie every Saturday and Sunday at 9.30 p m.
Amir Ali, Susmita Mukherjee, Raju Kher and new talent like Vaishnavi Dhanraj and Manmohan Tiwari form the cast for the show being produced by Siddharth Kumar Tiwari’s Swastik Productions.
For Rishtey, the channel which primarily offers old shows of Colors and Nickelodeon and some Bollywood films, Navrangi Re is its first Original show for the FTA channel
It is a partnership because the show has been funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with Viacom18 distributing, broadcasting, marketing and providing the show with strong network support, and BBC Action Media contributing by way of the creatives and the entertainment quotient of the show.
Creating a show with a strong social message for national television in these trying times when the entertainment quotient supersede everything else in the content pie, Rishtey will need to come up with a delicate mix of both, particularly because through and entertainment story, it is attempting to drive home the importance of good sanitation without preaching about the cause but delivering the message without watering it down with the entertainment quotient. A difficult ask, but one that it’s older sibling Colors has already perfected.
To speak about this, and others aspects like how a show like this is considered a better fit for Rishtey than for Colors, and more, I caught up with Sudhanshu Vats, Group CEO & MD, Viacom18.
Vats said “Our assessment is that Rishtey and Colors are quite comparable. On Colors the spill over of the message may be very high, because Colors goes to a very wide variety of urban audiences which do not face the issue of sanitation nearly as much as the audiences of Rishtey would. So I think the targeting of the desired audiences is superior on Rishtey than on Colors, and that’s the reason we’ve gone with it.”
“And this is also an experiment — as to how can one manage such a topic and make it entertaining, so let’s see how the experiment goes, and then we can re-evaluate all the aspects.”
On the network support, Vats said, “While the show will run on Rishtey, we shall also bring in the whole network to promote the show and try to drive audiences from different places. We will run the show parallel on Colors Gujarati and Colors Odia, and it will be available on our OTT platform, Voot. With the creation of content around content on Voot, we will drive audience back to the show.“
Commenting on the importance of entertainment in the show Ankur Garg, Head of Programme – Water and Sanitation at BBC Media Action said, “Sanitation as a subject links very well to humour which is what this show is building on, therefore at no point in time do we want to be preachy. This is why collectively as partners, we have taken a conscious decision to go on a commercial platform and make it as entertaining as possible and make sure that audiences come back day after day, week after week — because if people are not watching, then they won’t change their behaviour.”
Navrangi Re! comes as an additional to the short but growing list of finite fiction shows on Indian Television. What’s more, it comes at primetime on weekends, instead of the usual weekday slotting. So far, weekends have been largely dominated across GECs in general by reality shows, and that, for the longest time ever. Remember, reality shows are the biggest budget-guzzlers, and sometimes fail to build equity for themselves and provide ROI to channels. So this move by a nationally respected broadcaster to being in good quality finite fiction content on the weekends will not only usher in a financially relieving trend for Indian TV broadcasting, but also offer some variety to viewers of traditional television who have not yet cut the cord, on the weekends.
What’s more, in these trying NTO (New Tariff Order) times, the network, by creating Navrangi Re! for Rishtey – its first original content for a basically catch-up albeit successful TV channel of repeats – is giving Rishtey a ‘pull’ element amongst the consumers.
Navrangi Re! is attempting to bring about social change in an entertaining way. Whether and how well it succeeds depends upon the content quality, the marketing and distribution. And with Sid Tewary’s Swastik Productions and the messaging inputs from BBC Media Action, plus the support of the Gates Foundation, all coming together on and being driven the formidable Viacom18, it is more than likely that Navrangi Re! will rain new ‘colours’ on Rishtey. Let’s wait and watch.
