If I thought last year was a strange time in Asia’s television/video entertainment/channels/platforms industry, this year has to be even stranger. A bit because, among other things, there’s no telling really how the splintered and increasingly complicated content licensing environment will play out. But really because – while we’ve had the best reality television year ever in the history of reality television in Asia – it has been real life that has united the universe (and particularly the media universe given that it’s our own who are involved) in obsession.

The craze started when Star India’s former boss Peter Mukherjea’s wife Indrani was carted off to jail accused of murdering her sister, who turns out to be her daughter by one of her previous husbands, who Peter says he knew nothing about, who was having an affair with his son by a previous wife, which she didn’t like, he didn’t either, but the kids were both adults and there’s not a lot any of the parents could do about it. The sister-daughter disappeared without a word in 2012, reportedly to the U.S., and that’s the last anyone heard from her. Until some charred human remains, found in a forest, were identified as the poor girl’s by police, who were led there by sister-mother Mukherjea’s driver, who confessed out of the blue three years later, having been hauled in for something else entirely. There’s a second ex-husband involved too. He’s also been arrested. And then it turns out she may have been pregnant. The father? Allegedly, someone very very close to mother-sister Indrani. Who? No names mentioned at press time, but speculation is through the roof. The truth? Who knows.

And, oh no, that’s not all. As the media scandal of the century raged at the end of August, the whole sorry INX/9X saga burst into the open, picked over by a frenzied press and a public hungry to know what on earth the dead girl had done, apart from living with her brother-in-law/step-father’s son, to deserve being strangled, dumped and burned. Or burned and dumped, her body having been kept in the trunk of a car parked at the Mukherjea’s home overnight.

Turns out that the senior Mukherjeas, having leveraged Peter’s stellar career at News Corp’s Star India, raised a fair amount of millions from, among others, Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, to launch a broadcasting empire that was going up against Rupert Murdoch and everyone else. Allegations are that a whole lot of cash may have been skimmed off the top of the fund and parked/hidden with various family members. Tempers apparently flared when sister-daughter Sheena Bora refused to return the money, effectively sealing her fate. At least in her sister-mother’s mind. That’s one angle to the story in this trial by press, during which no comma and exclamation mark is going unreported. Another has been promised by Sheena Bora’s brother, also said to be sister-mother Indrani’s offspring posing as a sibling, who said in late August that if his mother didn’t confess soon, he was going to expose her. Can there really seriously be any more? Peter, meanwhile, says he know naught, and seems to be putting as much distance between himself and his beloved wife as he can.

I am trying my best to hold fast to the concept that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. At the same time, whoever did or didn’t do it, the allegations make for an atrocious but irresistible story that’s going to keep everyone gripped for months and maybe even, given the Indian legal system that we know and love, years.

What else is strange about the industry this year? Lots. But against Real Life (and death) with the Mukherjeas, nothing seems that strange after all.

This article first appeared as the Editor's Note in ContentAsia Issue 3, 2015, published in August 2015