Queen of Daily Soap, Ekta Kapoor reveals that she gets bored after 100 episodes of a TV show. Yes, you read it right and we all know that her most popular shows ‘Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’ ran over 1,800 episodes and ‘Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii’ entertained us with 1,600 plus episodes.
Ekta Kapoor set the trend, as her shows had a record-breaking run on Indian televisions. But the producer says that a sense of fatigue has now set in for her when it comes to making long running shows.
She spearheads the Balaji Telefilms banner which has for years dished out a mixed bag of daily soaps and most of which set the era of ‘saas-bahu’ dramas on Indian Television. But with the emergence of technology and an evolved medium like apps, Ekta also has ventured into with ALTBalaji.
She says things have changed, “When you write a story for thousand episodes, what you’re doing is a totally different entertainment experience — every day you get to see a slice of life of those characters. They become important and you don’t mind coming in to find out what is happening in their world. And for a thousand episodes, you can actually enjoy it because you love the characters.”
She further told in an interview with IANS, “That experience has been popular and it will continue, but it has been exhausted. Now, even a person like me feels a sense of fatigue doing even one show for a hundred episodes. I can pull it off for hundred, but after that, I get bored.”
“It’s a challenge to create something new, reach out to the viewers, get them attached to newer characters, and to then keep up storytelling. It was great fun earlier. Maybe I have done too much,” she added.
The world of app and its growing trend offered Ekta a platform and a chance to tell stories in a shorter format. On it she says, “There are these various stories you can’t do on TV because they don’t have the stretchability factor in them. They are great stories to be told, and they have a great culmination. Besides, the attention span of the audience has gone shorter, and maybe not everyone is buying into the experience of coming in every day to see characters for a long time.”
She also said that there may have been a ‘shift’ in the audience’s interest, but has growth too. Currently her show ‘Karle Tu Bhi Mohabbat’ is trending and with it, many other shows are streaming on ALTBalaji and gaining lots of popularity.
Web series and apps are the current trends, even today’s generation enjoys web series more than other things. People have no time to watch TV but have plenty to glued their eyes to mobile screens.
On it, Ekta said, “We are not being able to understand that the medium of television is growing like a giant. And the more it’s growing, it’s getting bigger and at the same time, creating more space for another medium.”
She added and said every time a person in a small village buys a TV, he becomes an added viewer and he enjoys the same thing which perhaps an urban viewer enjoyed a decade ago. “While there’s a certain audience that is exhausted with the medium, there’s another section getting absolutely enamoured by it.”
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