New Delhi: Kindly note that the fourth season of 'Emotional Atyachaar' has started on Bindass television channel and this time it packs the horrible best of everything you wanted to watch on voyeur TV. Don't get me wrong. I personally enjoy the show as it takes a moral sledgehammer to cheating men and women and infidelity always made a wonderful spectacle.
For the unenlightened, 'Emotional Atyachaar' is sort of contrarian in content and approach to that splendid (and I mean it in the kindest way) show 'Rakhi Ka Swayamvar'. While Atyachaar frowns heavily at infidelity, Swayamvar, in the guise of reviving a royal Indian tradition, gently encouraged it.
Hosted by the charming Parvesh Rana, EA this time is a 'do-it-yourself' pack of investigation that would make Daya of CID weep. While the focus is now directly on the 'victim' (for the want of a better word), who carries out his/her own loyalty test without help from the EA team, the new format lacks the biting edge of suspense.
Oh the joy of seeing Rana and a wronged party burst on to the scene of crime while the flabbergasted perpetrator tries to hide his face from the cameras. Lovers of police videos would acknowledge that there's a strange thrill in watching a criminal being taken down. Let fact checking and research not come in the way of a good story. Over the years reality shows and daytime soaps have content writers catering to the heavy browbeating and moral bullying their wide middleclass base of audiences expect to see.
And shows such as EA build on shock value and expose, expecting its captive audience to lap it up. And they do. Shock works on Indian TV. The most popular episodes of Bigg Boss were the ones that had people hurling abuses at each other or ganging up against one.
The new season of EA is a series of stories enacted by actors and the first episode featured a woman who suspected her boyfriend of cheating on her. She employs her close friend to try and seduce the man into taking a misstep and pinning him with infidelity.
The opening episode did not work for me - lacked thrill, refinement and good writing - and it didn't help that the women who played the wronged party, kept pronouncing mobile text 'messages' as 'massages'.
But the day is long and the sun is shining. EA competes directly with the Roadies 10 auditions so hopefully its writers will think of upping the ante. I live in hope.
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