TRPs: Gagging creativity or mirroring TV viewer`s tastes?
16 | BOOM
Will Salahuddin and Manahil ever get together? When will Aapaji’ s evil ways be revealed? These are just some of the questions, that Hira Anwar, senior producer at Hum TV calls“ hooks”, which literally hook the audience’ s attention to TV drama serials right till it ends.“ I feel the audience wants to see stories they can relate to. So you have to fi nd that story and create the hook,” says Anwar. A good hook, coupled with big stars and a riveting( some would say bizarre) story, will help rake in TRPs for Hum TV. Or so they hope, for at the end of the day producing drama serials remains a notoriously uncertain business. So what exactly are TRPs and why are TV channels so obsessed with them? TRPs or Television Rating Points are used to judge which programmes are viewed the most. They are calculated based on meters that are installed in certain homes that serve as representative samples. There are 713 meters installed all over Pakistan that represent TV viewership for satellite transmissions. Based on the meter‘ reading’, TRPs calculate when the households watch television and what they watch on it. In a world where a high number of views translate into high TRPs, which in turn translate into a bigger share of the advertising pie, it is no surprise that channels are forever looking for the‘ right’ kind of content. In simple terms, the greater the number of eyeballs that watch a show, the greater the number of advertisers who want to fl ash their product during the serial, the more money the channel makes from that show. However, what qualifi es as the‘ right content’ varies and depends on which side of the drama serial production equation you are sitting on. Raamis Tanveer Ahmed, head of content at Ironline Productions, gives the perspective of production houses which create content for channels,“ Channels like projects that show a roti dhoti aurat [ a woman who cries and has a wretched life ]. For instance, recently we sent four stories to a channel for approval. The one that got approved was the one that was being written by a big and successful writer and featured a miserable woman. In the drama that was approved, the husband was supposed to leave his wife for another woman. The channel told us to make the woman pregnant at the time the man leaves.” To back up his point, Ahmed goes on to talk about dramas that held much promise but did not work, confi rming the precariousness that showbiz is known for and giving an inkling of what according to him, works with the audience.“ There was a drama called Kankar in which the woman asks for her rights. It did not do so well despite featuring big stars such as Sanam Baloch and Fahad Mustafa and despite being written by veteran writer Umera Ahmed and produced by a respected production house. The audience could not relate to the female protagonist who becomes empowered.“ The same thing happened more recently with Dil Lagi. The drama features big stars such as Mehwish Hayat and Humayun Saeed and has been written by a famous writer, Faiza Iftikhar, but is hasn’ t done too well. I believe it is because the female protagonist is too self-reliant and practical. In contrast when Kankar was on air, there was a drama serial called Meray Harjai which was running concurrently and was getting a higher rating. Meray Harjai was about two sisters fi ghting and putting allegations on one another. Even Abroo, which has a typical saas-bahu theme, is doing well against Dil Lagi even though the cast does not feature big stars. Another drama that received high ratings was Kalmuhi in which a woman was beaten up and her hair was shorn.” Ahmed believes that‘ the disempowered woman’ is popular with the audience that he is catering to and hence that is what pulls in the ratings.“ We are told that we have to create stories for 15 to 45-year-old women who are watching the drama serial while cutting onions. These women see themselves as‘ bechari’ [ victim ] and relate to a bechari protagonist.” Sarwat Nazir, a writer who has written popular dramas such as Mein Abdul Qadir Hoon, also feels that ratings play a big role when it comes to deciding content because according to her“… off-beat concepts are usually