'Serial' Killers

In the course of my ugly graduate student life, there was one week where I saw the real American life. My uncle had just bought an Audi SUV and I went to his place to drive it, eat all I want, drink his margaritas and laze over the sofa watching endless TV. But then, a queer thing happened. During the afternoons, I had to share TV time with my Aunt, and being the gracious guest I was, I gave her company in all the Telugu serials she watched. The only images I had about these daily serials from my childhood were that of my mother and grandmother fighting and winning the contest of what channel we all watched. Since I so hated the world of soap opera, I decided to analyze it. I looked at it not in the sense of the effects it has on our aunts, mothers or grandmothers, but with a sense of how a person would go about making a serial. So, here are the strategies that I discovered.

1.       1. Looks: Look. Look deeply. Keep looking and never stop looking. This is probably the most common mantra employed by soap opera makers. Characters have a certain lag time between the moment they appear on screen and the time they start saying something. In one serial, when the husband arrived home, his wife looked suspiciously at him for 2 minutes straight (I timed it!) with a thundering music in the background.  Surely, no woman takes so long to recognize her husband!

2.       2. Delay elements: Soap opera makers are the kings of slow motion. I’m sure one of their future agendas is to have dialogues in slow motion as well. Apart from the usual wastage of time in an old woman trying to climb a few steps, or a male character driving all around town before he comes home, these guys employ some creative means as well. I came across this brilliant idea in one serial where a girl on the roof top is plotting to kill a girl on the ground. After going through all the options, the girl on the top decides to kill the other girl by dropping a flower pot on her head. So far, so good. When the girl on the top takes the flower pot in her hands, the girl on the ground starts walking, so now, both the girls are walking. They cover the breadth of the building once. Twice. Thrice! Then after 3 long minutes (I timed it. They walked in slow motion), she drops the pot. But then, there is a twist. There is this lunatic person who rushes into the picture, pushes the girl on the ground away and takes the hit from the pot. Since he is crazy, he jumps up and down that he saved her, and that nothing happened to him, and it’s almost a minute before…wait for it…before the blood starts gushing out of his head! That, I tell you, deserves an award!

3.       3. Paraphrasing: The script writers are masters of synonyms as well as active, passive voices. The same dialogue would go back n forth, with a few key words substituted with varying levels of the same emotion. A more recent innovation has been translating the dialogue from the regional language into English and saying it again, just so that they eat away a few more seconds.

4.       4. Camera angles: This method is probably the lousiest of the lot. If there is a character that appears as shocked in one frame, the camera would show him/her from east, west, north, south, north-east, south-west and all the other possible directions, not to forget all the angles from each direction. Some have discovered innovative ones like approach shots-my favorite is one where the camera starts from underneath the table on the first floor, moves along the steps and approaches the character (in slow motion, of course!).

At the end of all this brain wrecking analysis, I put myself through one last thing-an awards ceremony for soap opera artists. I could empathize with the best song award, stay indifferent to the best actor, actress awards, but what pushed me over the limit was an award that proved that we live in a world of contradictions – the best editor award!