![]() ![]() If it were on American TV, it would have taken us six, maybe seven, years to see Mazhar Khan as a middle-aged businessman in Hong Kong, making a "trunk call" to India to wish his father Alok Nath a happy ninetieth birthday. Buniyaad took almost exactly two years from start to finish. Either that, or some stupid politician died in that case, sometimes the TV channel would mourn for six long days with ghazals, and devotional and inspirational songs sung by either some Hindustani classical fart or a bunch of men and women clad in their white kurtas, pyjamas and sarees. Well, unless, that is, a bunch of politicians with sand in their vagina decided to cancel Safarnama. They just broadcast one episode after the other, and neither rain, nor sleet, nor sunshine could stop that. Back in those days ( cough cough, soda cost a nickel! A nickel! Ow, my back hurts!) Doordarshan wasn't worried about TV ratings, they were the ONLY thing you could watch on TV, so they didn't have an equivalent of SWEEPS WEEK where they would have to force Anita Kanwar from Buniyaad to participate in a Poker Challenge against Priya Tendulkar from Rajni, or have Vinod Nagpal from Hum Log wrestle Shriram Lagoo from Khandaan in a boxing ring, they didn't have to make sure a television show had a set number of episodes consecutively, before it quit for the whole year and came back the next season with fresh episodes. When Buniyaad went on to make more than a hundred episodes, it was BIG FUCKING DEAL. Television longevity was measured differently in the 80s. These days, we would call them both mini-series, but for some reason when I think back to the time, although I might consider Tamas a mini-series, I will not concede that Kashish was one, too. One of the shortest, most memorable TV shows was Kashish, a six-or-seven-or-eight-parter with Sudesh Berry and the really cute Malvika Tiwari. There are very few shows from the 80s that actually came back once they were done. You can't really call them seasons, because the one thing nice about TV shows in the 80s was that they were given a fixed number of episodes at the start: You could either go on for 13 weeks, which made you a medium-length show, or you could continue for 54 episodes, which would make you a Ramayan or a Khandaan. If you compare an "ordinary" American TV show to an Indian serial from the 80s, one striking difference is that back then, we never talked about "seasons". Indian shows at the time had only one "season", at best (or, as the case was sometimes, worst) two. ![]() An alphabetaized list of shows broadcast on Indian TV in the 80s ![]()
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