Show and Tell: Star World’s Rasika Tyagi

MasterChef Australia hosts and judges Gary Mehigan, George Calombaris and Matt Preston. Photo courtesy of Star World India.

In this new series of interviews, we talk to the programming heads of TV channels about how they go about deciding what we watch. To kick off, we met Rasika Tyagi of Star World to unveil such mysteries as: Who is more popular, KJo or Simi? Why is MasterChef Australia the biggest show on English TV? And, why the hell are they inundating us with promos of the eight-season old Grey’s Anatomy. Edited excerpts:

What genres work here?
I don’t think audiences actually look, understand or even want to care about genres. People don’t see shows as crime shows, or love stories or adventure shows. It’s amazing, every time I’ve gone and done any kind of research, I’ve realised that there’s such a disparity between how we watch anything and how audiences watch anything that I’ve decided that it’s never about genres. All stories are about characters. Do I like the character? Because I’ll watch the story irrespective of the genre if I like the character.

If it’s about characters, how do you decide what new shows to air?
We’re stepping back to say: what life cycle is my audience in? Here’s where we think you are: you’ve just about graduated, you’re in a new job and/or in your first serious, responsible relationship, which could be a marriage or not. Now, I’m not doing it from a genre perspective. [I'm saying to the majority of these people watching Hindi entertainment] are your stories and your angst being represented by what you’re watching?

What are your top-rated shows?
The top-rated shows of all time are MasterChef Australia, Castle, Dexter, How I Met Your Mother.

We’ll get to MasterChef Australia later. But why these shows?
Castle is an awesome show. ‘Will they won’t they’ is a big hook. The X-Files started like that…Remington Steele, Bones. All these have worked. Here, there’s one cop, one writer. Both beautiful characters, brilliantly written, a lot of humour. It’s easy to watch, it’s not very procedural. Very heavy procedural shows don’t work in India.

Why do you think MasterChef Australia has become a huge hit?
Every time we’ve gone and asked consumers and said ‘Why do you like MasterChef?’, there are two things that come up. I think we want the belief that we can do it. I don’t think any one of us wants to be sat down and told that we’re shit and that only the best chefs in the world can cook and you can’t cook. The whole show tells you that you can pursue and become anything you want to be. The messaging of the show goes beyond cooking. We’re all struggling where we are in our lives. We all want somebody to tell us, ‘You know what, you can do it’.

Enough of English-speaking India is now travelling so we want to understand what’s happening with international food. But there are many shows that do that, so you don’t really need to see MasterChef and sit through such a long-running show. People go into it because of the positivity and because of the amount they invest in the contestants. Again, I come back to characters. We’ve found that you pick very early the top five or six people you like.

With shows like MasterChef, there’s always the danger of finding out who eventually wins online or from someone. Why can’t we see them as close to the date they are seen abroad?
With any show, you want to be as close to the airing as possible. Except, as India, we pay approximately 10 to 15 per cent of the cost of making the show. It’s an expensive show. The network that pays 80 per cent [of the production costs] to make the show in Australia didn’t want it on air anywhere until they had finished it completely. [But] times are changing; it’s changing faster in the US, it’s taking longer in other parts of the world. With this network, they’ve never had a show that they’ve had to share with the world. They were like ‘Wait for us to finish and put it on air’. I was like ‘That makes no sense, we don’t share the same audience. You don’t beam into us, we don’t beam into you. I don’t have online rights and even if I did, I’d geo-block it’. After a lot of conversations, we came to the understanding of [airing it] one month later [than Australia].

Here, unlike the West, why do we see shows in blocks rather than on a weekly basis?
Today, when we talk to studios, we say [we want to air the show on the same] day and date [as the US]. We’ve actually launched a show before America, called Missing. But that was an exception. All content askers in India are saying, there’s a Pirate Bay. But that’s a losing battle, music has already taught us that. How many people want to see things ‘day and date’? From our learnings with Missing, we went out and asked people, you know we launched such a big show before America, do you care? The problem is the percentage of people who care is so small.

If I have to go day and date, I have to do one episode a week and I have to do three hiatuses of one month each. There are only 22 episodes but they are shown over nine months. But all of America goes on hiatus, so it’s easy for audiences there to understand that at this period, nothing will happen. First I’m asking audiences, ‘You watch 600 other channels one way, Monday to Friday same content. You watch everything else one way, but on my channel you learn to watch in a totally different way. You remember Monday’s House, Tuesday’s Castle [and so on].’ I’ve tried it. People were like, ‘What are you doing?’ Monday was Dexter because it airs in America on Sundays. The ratings on that slot dipped to under half. I understand why. People don’t watch TV that way.

Our second problem is every other channel, you will see the same characters and follow their stories for at least a minimum of one year. Successful shows in India last two years, on Hindi entertainment which is what the maximum number of people watch. The percentage of people who watch English entertainment to the exception of everything else, I don’t even know how to count, they’re so few they don’t even come up on the meters.

Nobody has been able to deliver the potential of millions of Indians speaking English and not watching English. You’re used to watching every other channel in a certain way, you’re used to following one character’s life over a really, really long time. Let me show you the stories the way you’re used to seeing them elsewhere, let me pick stories that have issues and crises and dramas that are similar to your life. Most important, let me try to and somehow break the barrier in your head that if it’s not the colour of my skin, it cannot be my problem.

Which got the better ratings, Koffee with Karan or Simi Selects?
In terms of ratings, by the end of the season, Karan had a slight edge over Simi.

What’s been your experience with locally-produced programming?
We’ve done only two non-Bollywood shows. The Dewarists and Teacher’s Achievers’ Club, where we profiled ten successful people and their philosophy in life. Love 2 Hate U, concept wise, it was in the right space, execution wise I agree huge amounts of challenges. Indian content, we’ve been on and off with it. We’ve been on with it obviously because of the amount of attention it gets a really small channel. Every time Karan is on, we’re in the Bombay Times literally every day. In addition to the fact the we really believe in the show and love the show.

The Dewarists was an experiment. It’s hard to find somebody to finance an alternative music show. I don’t know where I would have gone and got the money. Thank god, they were like this brand wants to do it. We found synergy there. Should we be telling our own stories in English? Duh, yes, obviously. How do you finance them? Because you will be compared to the best drama, best shooting, best scripting, the best editing in the world. There’s no base for it in India. We don’t make English films. There is no pool for us from where we can start the process. It will happen. It has to. The Dewarists and Teacher’s will have a second season. Karan will also come back. Simi and Love 2 Hate U, we’re still taking a call on.

Simi Selects got a lot of negative feedback.
I’m aware of the opinions. Even having such a response to a show, frankly, I’m really happy. In the amount of clutter of media and what you hear about a channel of our size…you didn’t see a billion hoardings of that show…within a week of the launch, everybody knew who Kiki was. There are few people who can do that. Love her, hate her, Simi is not ever going to be ignorable. That’s the mark of a true star.

When you’re dealing with such small audience numbers, how do you define a hit?
How I would define a hit is very different from how the business would define a hit. Obviously, ratings are pretty much the only things looked at from an economics perspective. I have tried to change that, and said, let’s look at ratings plus let’s look at what’s happening on Twitter, what’s happening digitally on Facebook. How much buzz have we been able to create, how many mentions it’s got, how many ‘likes’ it’s got, all of this should lead to us defining whether a show is successful or not. Few ratings meters measure English in the first place. To be honest, all of this helps support a good rating. If the rating is not good in the first place, none of this works. For example, all of this was extremely high on Love 2 Hate U. Every time it used to air, it used to trend [on Twitter]. Facebook, good or bad, at least people were talking about it. But on ratings meters, it didn’t show up so it was considered a big miss.

What’s the deal with bleeping out almost any word that could have the slightest sexual or religious connotation?
Earlier, the censorship was done by the Information & Broadcasting Ministry. Now there’s a committee called the Indian Broadcasting Foundation. It’s a committee that’s got representatives in rotation from all channels and two government representatives. There’s this set of guidelines to the TV channels, which is available online. Why you’ll see different channels doing different things is that there is no standard. [Today] we were having a conversation [about whether we] should we allow ‘penis’? I said yes, because it is in the dictionary. ‘Dick’ is not okay. We should allow ‘prostitute’ but not ‘whore’ or ‘slut’ because those are slangs. The guidelines are: let’s not show abusive language. What is not abusive language is left to the discretion of the channel. There are no 50 words written down. It’s saying, you know who your audience is. If we’re not sensible ourselves, the government will decide for us and that will not be good for anybody.

There is a rule that before 11pm, you cannot show a certain kind of content. Family Guy was a really hard decision. We didn’t think at all that it warranted post-11pm, everyone else thought it did. We talked to the IBF about it and said, it might have been a bad episode that raised people’s hackles. This is a committee you can at least have a dialogue with, unlike diktats that come down to you, which is how it used to happen. They sat and watched ten episodes, and said, ‘You know what? No, actually we’re not comfortable [with showing it before 11pm]’.

What’s the point of screening a show like Californication when you have to censor almost half of it?
We’ve just taken over FX and Fox Crime because they’ve moved the beams to India from Hong Kong. Prime time for them, which is when they showed Californication, is 8pm for us. We want to be responsible broadcasters. The IBF called me and said ‘Why are we seeing Californication before 11pm?’ and I was like, ‘You know, we are editing it a lot’. They were like let’s not argue about how much you’re editing it, thematically there is nothing you can do. I had no defence. Thematically, it should be shown after 11pm, where we have the wherewithal to say now come on we expect children to be asleep or [have] parental guidance.

How do you address dealing with piracy?
Until now, we’ve not dealt with it. Nobody has done anything. It’s a trickle. We’re all very well aware of the fact that this trickle is only growing, especially in this language. I don’t think other languages have to worry about this as much as English does right now.

Finally, why the hell are we seeing so many promos for Grey’s Anatomy?
Who knows Grey’s Anatomy? People who watch English TV. It isn’t meant for them. This is my first experiment to try and get people who don’t watch English TV to watch English TV. You’re not the target audience. You already know about the show but you’re such a small audience. We’re going outside for the first time. First, movies, the lowest-hanging fruit. If you watch English movies, can you watch English entertainment? I’m also trying them (the promos) on all the other languages that we have. You will see them on Star Plus, Channel [V]. We’ve also bought [space on] channels outside our own network. That is why it’s coming out of your ears.

Format

MasterChef Australia hosts and judges Gary Mehigan, George Calombaris and Matt Preston. Photo courtesy of Star World India. In this new series of interviews, we talk to the programming heads of TV channels about how they go about deciding what we watch. To kick off, we met Rasika Tyagi of Star World to unveil such mysteries as: Who is more popular, KJo or Simi? Why is MasterChef Australia the biggest show on English TV? And, why the hell are they inundating us with promos of the eight-season old Grey’s Anatomy. Edited excerpts:
What genres work here?
I don’t think audiences actually look, understand or even want to care about genres. People don’t see shows as crime shows, or love stories or adventure shows. It’s amazing, every time I’ve gone and done any kind of research, I’ve realised that there’s such a disparity between how we watch anything and how audiences watch anything that I’ve decided that it’s never about genres. All stories are about characters. Do I like the character? Because I’ll watch the story irrespective of the genre if I like the character.
If it’s about characters, how do you decide what new shows to air?
We’re stepping back to say: what life cycle is my audience in? Here’s where we think you are: you’ve just about graduated, you’re in a new job and/or in your first serious, responsible relationship, which could be a marriage or not. Now, I’m not doing it from a genre perspective. [I'm saying to the majority of these people watching Hindi entertainment] are your stories and your angst being represented by what you’re watching?
What are your top-rated shows?
The top-rated shows of all time are MasterChef Australia, Castle, Dexter, How I Met Your Mother.
We’ll get to MasterChef Australia later. But why these shows?
Castle is an awesome show. ‘Will they won’t they’ is a big hook. The X-Files started like that…Remington Steele, Bones. All these have worked. Here, there’s one cop, one writer. Both beautiful characters, brilliantly written, a lot of humour. It’s easy to watch, it’s not very procedural. Very heavy procedural shows don’t work in India.
Why do you think MasterChef Australia has become a huge hit?
Every time we’ve gone and asked consumers and said ‘Why do you like MasterChef?’, there are two things that come up. I think we want the belief that we can do it. I don’t think any one of us wants to be sat down and told that we’re shit and that only the best chefs in the world can cook and you can’t cook. The whole show tells you that you can pursue and become anything you want to be. The messaging of the show goes beyond cooking. We’re all struggling where we are in our lives. We all want somebody to tell us, ‘You know what, you can do it’.
Enough of English-speaking India is now travelling so we want to understand what’s happening with international food. But there are many shows that do that, so you don’t really need to see MasterChef and sit through such a long-running show. People go into it because of the positivity and because of the amount they invest in the contestants. Again, I come back to characters. We’ve found that you pick very early the top five or six people you like.
With shows like MasterChef, there’s always the danger of finding out who eventually wins online or from someone. Why can’t we see them as close to the date they are seen abroad?
With any show, you want to be as close to the airing as possible. Except, as India, we pay approximately 10 to 15 per cent of the cost of making the show. It’s an expensive show. The network that pays 80 per cent [of the production costs] to make the show in Australia didn’t want it on air anywhere until they had finished it completely. [But] times are changing; it’s changing faster in the US, it’s taking longer in other parts of the world. With this network, they’ve never had a show that they’ve had to share with the world. They were like ‘Wait for us to finish and put it on air’. I was like ‘That makes no sense, we don’t share the same audience. You don’t beam into us, we don’t beam into you. I don’t have online rights and even if I did, I’d geo-block it’. After a lot of conversations, we came to the understanding of [airing it] one month later [than Australia].
Here, unlike the West, why do we see shows in blocks rather than on a weekly basis?
Today, when we talk to studios, we say [we want to air the show on the same] day and date [as the US]. We’ve actually launched a show before America, called Missing. But that was an exception. All content askers in India are saying, there’s a Pirate Bay. But that’s a losing battle, music has already taught us that. How many people want to see things ‘day and date’? From our learnings with Missing, we went out and asked people, you know we launched such a big show before America, do you care? The problem is the percentage of people who care is so small.
If I have to go day and date, I have to do one episode a week and I have to do three hiatuses of one month each. There are only 22 episodes but they are shown over nine months. But all of America goes on hiatus, so it’s easy for audiences there to understand that at this period, nothing will happen. First I’m asking audiences, ‘You watch 600 other channels one way, Monday to Friday same content. You watch everything else one way, but on my channel you learn to watch in a totally different way. You remember Monday’s House, Tuesday’s Castle [and so on].’ I’ve tried it. People were like, ‘What are you doing?’ Monday was Dexter because it airs in America on Sundays. The ratings on that slot dipped to under half. I understand why. People don’t watch TV that way.
Our second problem is every other channel, you will see the same characters and follow their stories for at least a minimum of one year. Successful shows in India last two years, on Hindi entertainment which is what the maximum number of people watch. The percentage of people who watch English entertainment to the exception of everything else, I don’t even know how to count, they’re so few they don’t even come up on the meters.
Nobody has been able to deliver the potential of millions of Indians speaking English and not watching English. You’re used to watching every other channel in a certain way, you’re used to following one character’s life over a really, really long time. Let me show you the stories the way you’re used to seeing them elsewhere, let me pick stories that have issues and crises and dramas that are similar to your life. Most important, let me try to and somehow break the barrier in your head that if it’s not the colour of my skin, it cannot be my problem.
Which got the better ratings, Koffee with Karan or Simi Selects?
In terms of ratings, by the end of the season, Karan had a slight edge over Simi.
What’s been your experience with locally-produced programming?
We’ve done only two non-Bollywood shows. The Dewarists and Teacher’s Achievers’ Club, where we profiled ten successful people and their philosophy in life. Love 2 Hate U, concept wise, it was in the right space, execution wise I agree huge amounts of challenges. Indian content, we’ve been on and off with it. We’ve been on with it obviously because of the amount of attention it gets a really small channel. Every time Karan is on, we’re in the Bombay Times literally every day. In addition to the fact the we really believe in the show and love the show.
The Dewarists was an experiment. It’s hard to find somebody to finance an alternative music show. I don’t know where I would have gone and got the money. Thank god, they were like this brand wants to do it. We found synergy there. Should we be telling our own stories in English? Duh, yes, obviously. How do you finance them? Because you will be compared to the best drama, best shooting, best scripting, the best editing in the world. There’s no base for it in India. We don’t make English films. There is no pool for us from where we can start the process. It will happen. It has to. The Dewarists and Teacher’s will have a second season. Karan will also come back. Simi and Love 2 Hate U, we’re still taking a call on.
Simi Selects got a lot of negative feedback.
I’m aware of the opinions. Even having such a response to a show, frankly, I’m really happy. In the amount of clutter of media and what you hear about a channel of our size…you didn’t see a billion hoardings of that show…within a week of the launch, everybody knew who Kiki was. There are few people who can do that. Love her, hate her, Simi is not ever going to be ignorable. That’s the mark of a true star.
When you’re dealing with such small audience numbers, how do you define a hit?
How I would define a hit is very different from how the business would define a hit. Obviously, ratings are pretty much the only things looked at from an economics perspective. I have tried to change that, and said, let’s look at ratings plus let’s look at what’s happening on Twitter, what’s happening digitally on Facebook. How much buzz have we been able to create, how many mentions it’s got, how many ‘likes’ it’s got, all of this should lead to us defining whether a show is successful or not. Few ratings meters measure English in the first place. To be honest, all of this helps support a good rating. If the rating is not good in the first place, none of this works. For example, all of this was extremely high on Love 2 Hate U. Every time it used to air, it used to trend [on Twitter]. Facebook, good or bad, at least people were talking about it. But on ratings meters, it didn’t show up so it was considered a big miss.
What’s the deal with bleeping out almost any word that could have the slightest sexual or religious connotation?
Earlier, the censorship was done by the Information & Broadcasting Ministry. Now there’s a committee called the Indian Broadcasting Foundation. It’s a committee that’s got representatives in rotation from all channels and two government representatives. There’s this set of guidelines to the TV channels, which is available online. Why you’ll see different channels doing different things is that there is no standard. [Today] we were having a conversation [about whether we] should we allow ‘penis’? I said yes, because it is in the dictionary. ‘Dick’ is not okay. We should allow ‘prostitute’ but not ‘whore’ or ‘slut’ because those are slangs. The guidelines are: let’s not show abusive language. What is not abusive language is left to the discretion of the channel. There are no 50 words written down. It’s saying, you know who your audience is. If we’re not sensible ourselves, the government will decide for us and that will not be good for anybody.
There is a rule that before 11pm, you cannot show a certain kind of content. Family Guy was a really hard decision. We didn’t think at all that it warranted post-11pm, everyone else thought it did. We talked to the IBF about it and said, it might have been a bad episode that raised people’s hackles. This is a committee you can at least have a dialogue with, unlike diktats that come down to you, which is how it used to happen. They sat and watched ten episodes, and said, ‘You know what? No, actually we’re not comfortable [with showing it before 11pm]’.
What’s the point of screening a show like Californication when you have to censor almost half of it?
We’ve just taken over FX and Fox Crime because they’ve moved the beams to India from Hong Kong. Prime time for them, which is when they showed Californication, is 8pm for us. We want to be responsible broadcasters. The IBF called me and said ‘Why are we seeing Californication before 11pm?’ and I was like, ‘You know, we are editing it a lot’. They were like let’s not argue about how much you’re editing it, thematically there is nothing you can do. I had no defence. Thematically, it should be shown after 11pm, where we have the wherewithal to say now come on we expect children to be asleep or [have] parental guidance.
How do you address dealing with piracy?
Until now, we’ve not dealt with it. Nobody has done anything. It’s a trickle. We’re all very well aware of the fact that this trickle is only growing, especially in this language. I don’t think other languages have to worry about this as much as English does right now.
Finally, why the hell are we seeing so many promos for Grey’s Anatomy?
Who knows Grey’s Anatomy? People who watch English TV. It isn’t meant for them. This is my first experiment to try and get people who don’t watch English TV to watch English TV. You’re not the target audience. You already know about the show but you’re such a small audience. We’re going outside for the first time. First, movies, the lowest-hanging fruit. If you watch English movies, can you watch English entertainment? I’m also trying them (the promos) on all the other languages that we have. You will see them on Star Plus, Channel [V]. We’ve also bought [space on] channels outside our own network. That is why it’s coming out of your ears.
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