India’s content environment, says Applause Entertainment CEO Sameer Nair, is the “ultimate candy shop”. The limitless opportunities unfolding come with their own set of pressures on the country’s storytellers, he tells ContentAsia.

Less than 10 of Netflix’s India originals have made it to the streamer’s new Top 10 TV lists for India since the most-watched rankings platform launched in November with five months worth of back data.

Call My Agent: Bollywood is the latest of the nine series to have attracted enough hours watched to qualify for the top 10 in India, joining shows such as House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths (the only India show that has made it to the global Top 10 for non-English TV), Kota Factory seasons one and two, anthology series Feels Like Ishq season 1 and Comedy Premium League, which is the sole Netflix original to have made it to number one in its home country. There’s also Crime Stories: India Detectives, season one, a four-episode series that appeared at number seven in the week of its 22 September debut and then sank, never to return.

For whatever this says (or doesn’t) about the performance of Netflix’s India originals in their home market, its ranking on a tiny list distinguishes Call My Agent: Bollywood from the original productions rushing across India.

Applause Entertainment, the four-year-old production house behind  this Indian adaptation of the French series, has clearly built on ambitious launch goals in a market that, for all its decades worth of output in a market of about 210 million TV homes, is a newcomer to premium drama.   

Today, Applause says its content war chest could top US$500 million in the next three to four years, with a strong and broad line up of original drama and adaptations, feature films, documentaries and animation across streaming platforms. 

Netflix’s streaming rivals in India are way less transparent, but, in the absence of performance data, actions speak for themselves. 

In October this year, Applause Entertainment and BBC Studios India announced the return of premium Indian drama, Criminal Justice, to Disney+ Hotstar for a third season. There’s an adaptation of Middle East drama Fauda for India, along with Rudra, the local version of BBC Studios’ Luther. 

These follow a ContentAsia Awards 2021 win for Criminal Justice’s second season, Criminal Justice: Behind Closed Doors (Dec 2020), for Best Asian Drama Series for a Regional/International Market. The first season of Criminal Justice premiered in India in April 2019. The franchise is among Hotstar Specials’ most watched shows on Disney+ Hotstar, the companies said, giving no specifics. 

The ContentAsia Awards’ win at the end of August was followed in October by the 26th Busan International Film Festival’s Kim Jiseok Award 2021 for Indian filmmaker Aparna Sen’s The Rapist, won jointly with Philippines/Japan sports feature, Gensan Punch. Praise for the film was glorious. The Rapist, Variety said, was “a deeply affecting portrait of personal trauma and an intelligent examination of social and cultural factors fueling the horrifying prevalence of sexual violence in India”.  

In the run-up to its award-winning streak, Applause released its 25th premium show, "Mayanagari: City of Dreams" 2, on Disney+ Hotstar. In a flow of new deals, the company also announced the adaptation of British drama, "Guilt", along with its first foray into animation and its first movie slate. 

Plus there are the beginnings of a documentary strand, hot on the heels of "Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story", a risky project about a major financial scandal that Applause Entertainment CEO, Sameer Nair, had on his production wish list for 10 years. The series, impossible to produce in a broadcast TV environment, streams on SonyLiv in India. 

For Nair, things are clearly falling into place.

Streaming accelerated options. The pandemic encouraged content sampling. “We are on track” in a market on the right trajectory, he says. 

Applause’s three new tracks – animation, feature films and documentaries – are part of a studio model that is consciously and strategically format and medium agnostic.

Nair says the aim is telling the best stories with as wide a range of story tellers as possible, from veterans to young filmmakers, in different languages from different regions, in a cross-section of formats. 

“We are telling more stories. Not every story can be told in one specific format... some work better in non-fiction than fiction. Some are better animated. But they are all stories,” Nair says, adding: “We are now living in a streaming world, which is really a world without borders, where content also has no borders. That’s the approach”. 

The animation focus revolves around a partnership with publisher Amar Chitra Katha to adapt 400+ comics. The exclusive multi-genre deal was announced in August this year. 

“Animation is just one more form of storytelling,” Nair says. Amar Chitra Katha, in particular, encompasses epic elements –  fables and legends, great heros, brave hearts, valiant women, defenders of the nation, mythology and modern stories... “It’s great material to animate,” he adds. The hope is to appeal to both domestic and international audiences. 

At the same time, drama is very likely to remain Applause’s mainstay.

“We love drama... and there’s a really big pipeline coming up”, including a slate of returning seasons, such as "Criminal Justice" season three and a second season of "Scam".

The company heads into 2022 with more productions on its planner across a wider geographic footprint than at any time in its four-year history. 

The spike in India’s streaming audience to 50 million homes from between five and 10 million pre-Covid-19, hasn’t pulled Applause off its original path. “I think the big thing that’s happened is that a much larger audience base has sampled and become aware and used to what this streaming world is,” Nair says. 

There’s also the rise of what has become known as the mass-niche. In a non-linear platform you have a different type of content, you have a mass of niches you can cater to. It’s not a one size fits all, it’s not appointment-driven viewing. There are all those other behaviours that audiences in India are now discovering. And they are saying that ‘Wow, this is good. We love that we can see different content’,” Nair says. 

“This allows us to tell new stories, new genres in different languages, ... different genres, different formats, different budgets, different scale” all co-existing on the same streaming platforms, which he describes as “the ultimate content candy shops”.  

The rise of India’s premium drama space has filled the gap between the old and wildly popular pulpy soaps and feature films, opening the opportunity to “tell better stories, [with] more layers... We have more time. We are able to do that”.

It’s all part of the different languages India’s filmmakers are beginning to speak. “Our movie required us to speak in a different language. A daily soap opera makes you speak in a different language. A large mass audience looks to react differently from a large niche audience.

“What is happening is that we are getting a chance to tell better stories, to explore taboo themes, to more gray rather than black or white, to talk about uncomfortable things and we’re getting to do it well. And the audiences are reacting well to it.”

Nair attributes Applause’s success as much to the effort his team is putting in as to audience evolution and, in turn, the pressure this is putting on storytellers.  

With "Scam", for instance, “we are anyway telling a story, a financial story. We are taking a chance on a period piece. We’re doing all of those things, but the audience has also grown up to respond to us. The audience is changing, and I think it’s putting more pressure on us as storytellers. We have to be smarter, more intelligent, more mindful,” he says. 

He’s not forgetting more socially conscious. “You know, entertainment is one thing, but there also has to be some degree of sensitivity, gender equality... We have to address the social issues that surround us... we can’t be blind to all this.” 

“Our job as storytellers is to try and hold a society of the mirror and to try and tell these stories as well as we can.”

Published in ContentAsia December 2021 magazine