Acclaimed American TV series Homeland and the upcoming Indian daily television serial POW- Bandhi Yudh Ke are adaptations of Hatufim. And 60 of the total 126 episodes of POW have been canned even before the first episode goes on air this Monday. Now that TV audiences are so used to the daily show format, Star thought it would be risky to go with a once-a-week format as viewer interest may flag. When Advani gathered his team of ten years standing around him, rolled up his sleeves and got to work, he was aware that he was carrying a heavy burden – of being seen as a game changer for Hindi television, albeit with certain safety nets in place. “But I never got one phone call from them telling me do this, don’t do this. “I wondered if Star would allow me to make the show the way I wanted to,” he says. The fact that the show works on two levels – the personal (how the families of the men cope with what are essentially two strangers coming back into their lives) and the political (have they actually escaped from the enemy or have they been sent back?) – appealed to him. “I loved the show when I saw it,” says Advani who believes that the time has come for creative people to be platform agnostic. Filmmaker Nikhil Advani, who directed the action thriller D-Day, was roped into directing the project.
POW is the Hindi adaptation of Israeli show Hatufim (remade into the popular American show Homeland), about the return of two Indian prisoners of war after a 17-year absence, and is the passion project of Star Plus editor Saugata Mukherjee, who joined the network from the rarified world of publishing. This time round Star Plus is experimenting with a fiction show that’s far removed from its regular fare - yet has enough family-emotion elements so as not to completely alienate traditional viewers. It may seem odd that the show is on Star Plus, an ardent advocate of saas-bahu soaps, but perhaps we should remember that it was Star Plus that telecast Aamir Khan’s show on social issues, Satyamev Jayate, in 2012. Can it dislodge the iron rule of the saas? Or finish off the nagin, the new supernatural avatar of the bahu? It’s called POW – Bandi Yudh Ke, and as the name suggests, hardly your standard issue saas-bau soap.
There’s a new daily Hindi TV show in town.