What makes soaps tick?

If in the West viewers plump for legal drama, here it is family tear-jerkers that sell. Producers of daily soaps on television milk the genres for all they are worth, says SEVANTI NINAN.

WAFER THIN, angst- ridden Ally McBeal, and devoted homemaker and adoring wife Tulsi, are pregnant again. What do these two women personify? The TV obsessions of two very different societies.

While Americans are obsessed with legal drama, Indian TV audiences are suckers for family sagas with enough twists and turns to make the producers of ``The Bold and The Beautiful'' envious. Study popular culture, and it tells you something about the people who consume it.

In an online forum on legal TV the question is asked by an American, of another American - ``What does so much law on TV say about the country's culture?'' And a criminal defence attorney responds by saying that the American public is drawn to conflict, and that law, which is a form of shared civil religion in the U.S., pervades more aspects of America's social, political, and moral life than it would in most other countries.

In a country where legal recourse is commonly resorted to in most walks of life, people like to watch court cases as drama, and they like to watch fiction where you can relate to lawyers as idealised professionals as well as sometimes flawed, vulnerable human beings. Like Ally and her colleagues. Even a channel like Animal Planet has a court series relating to cases filed about pets, Judge Wapner's Court.

Last month, Court TV in the U.S. completed 10 years. It is a TV channel which runs nothing but trials, and during an anniversary discussion the host was harking back to the first case televised, Florida vs. Hill.

The real life case had a story line as dramatic as anything a script writer might have thought up: a man accused of a murder decades ago, is finally brought to the bar of justice by his son, who had become a cop and solved the case. In other countries, in less litigation-obsessed societies, would a channel like this find enough takers to be a viable proposition? Probably not.

Now, 730 televised trials later, Americans are drawn to Court TV, primarily because of the real life legal drama it offers. Anybody can suggest a trial to the channel, and they can be in any town in the U.S., except that not all courts allow cameras. Says the channel's head, ``We look at all the trials that are open to us, and show the ones we think you'll want to see.''

In other words, the ones that have gossip value. He added, ``Towards the end of the summer, look for a trial from New Jersey involving a rabbi accused of plotting to have his wife killed.''

Court TV is reality TV but the genre of legal drama that fictionalises the profession is the popular prime time staple on network TV.

They usually present heroic TV lawyers, risking all to save their clients or clever ones thinking up original lines of defence.

A Butte College document ``Exploring Contemporary TV'' lists the number of shows there have been. ``Civil Wars'', ``Reasonable Doubts'', ``L.A. Law'', ``The Client'' and ``The Practice'' are the most recent programmes presenting TV lawyers. Lawyers have been detectives (``Perry Mason'', ``Matlock'' and ``The Client''). They have fought for constitutional rights (``The Defenders'', ``The Practice''). And they have just been sexy (``Judd for the Defense'' and ``L.A. Law''). And the legal profession in the U.S. takes this legal drama industry seriously. The American Bar Association has in the past presented its Gavel Award to ``The Practice''.

Sometimes they have also been packaged as lighter entertainment - witness the musical, ``Ally McBeal'', shown recently on STAR World or the romantic comedy, ``Ed'', on NBC, which was described as ``lawyer lite'', by a critic.

And of course, the whole legal fiction industry has strong competition from medical shows starring doctors and nurses as heroes and heroines.

In India on the other hand, while there have been serials on cases and on the profession (``Bhanwar'' on Sony and ``Your Honour'' currently on Sony) legal fiction can never compete with family melodrama.

Why is that? Because women watch more TV than men, and what is of primary fascination to them, is the politics within families. Zee TV's big success ``Amanat'', took inspiration from ``Fiddler on the Roof'', and presented a family drama where the protagonist was hanging on to traditional Indian values in attempting to rear his seven daughters.

In a son-obsessed country the audience's empathy with him for having had seven daughters, ensured that ``Amanat'' stayed at the top of the viewing charts for a long time. It was in its own way, a trend setter for the tear-jerkers to follow.

Today all the leading Hindi entertainment concepts milk this genre for all it is worth. Sony's programming chief Rekha Nigam once explained why these soaps have such irresistible appeal.

``Even when working women meet in the evening as friends what do they talk about? One of them would say, do you know what my mother-in-law did today?'' And ``Amanat'''s producer Sapna Bhattacharya has said in an interview that ``Amanat'' succeeds because ``it has the right blend of drama, conflict, emotions and easily identifiable characters.

In every household, the parents follow the happiness and heartaches of their daughters with fond indulgence and concern.''

In a child-centred, family-centred society, family drama succeeds on television. UTV's Zarina Mehta provides another logical explanation for why this genre is now expanding on all the entertainment channels, and why weekly evening soaps are rapidly become dailies.

With the expanding reach of satellite and cable TV to smaller towns, a huge lower- middle class and middle class audience which was earlier being catered to by Hindi films has entered the satellite TV catchment, she says, and their tastes in viewing are influencing channel programming.

Entertainment options for the women in these families are limited, and the gaps between episodes in a weekly serial are too long. Give them the same story with a shorter gap of 24 hours between episodes, and you will have them hooked.

Sony's ``Ek Mahal Ho Sapno Ka'' completed 700 episodes in June, making it the longest running daily soap. And again it has no pretensions to being anything other than a family saga.

Even as it continues to be watched, Sony has launched ``Kkusum'', and ``Diya Jale Kahin Jiya''. How regressive is such melodrama? Pretty regressive. Women are shown doing precious little outside the house, and for that matter precious little inside it, other than sitting around beautifully dressed, waiting for the husband to come home, or bickering with the bahu or saas, or conniving against a fellow sister-in-law.

Or getting pregnant. A recent episode of ``Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi'' had Mandira, who had seduced Mihir during his memory loss period, and Tulsi his wife, both throwing up in mid- conversation.

Indian notions of depicting pregnancy have not changed over the years. Evidently the chocolate box hero whose television demise had the Indian middle class in Western India so worked up that he had to be resurrected, is now making up for lost time.

Men are shown two-timing in ``Kkusum'', ``Kahin Diya Jale Kahin Jiya'' and in ``Kabhi Sautan Kabhi Saheli'', and women are shown taking it. Kusum simply emotes with her large eyes, from episode to episode, looking distressed. Payal in ``Kahin Diya...'' does likewise.

Morality in the Great Indian Family is a pretty flexible commodity but nobody is complaining. So between litigious Americans and conniving or philandering Indians, take your pick.

(The theme for this article came from a question asked by Saraswathi, a reader from Mysore.)

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