Interview: Behind Sony LIV’s ‘less is more’ slate, a push for non-Hindi shows and period dramas

After rolling out Bench Life, Tanaav 2, Brinda, 36 Days and Lampan over the last few months, Sony LIV has a few more series on offer before the end of the year. These include Manvat Murders, Raat Jawaan Hai, Jai Mahendran and Freedom at Midnight – shows in different languages and genres, in keeping with the streaming platform’s stated aim of pursuing a variegated viewership.

The content division of Sony Pictures Networks India isn’t as high-profile or prolific as its rivals. Yet, Sony LIV has scored hits in the past few years, among them Scam 1992 – The Harshad Mehta Story, Rocket Boys and Tabbar. Series such as Gullak, Tanaav and Maharani have gained follow-up seasons.

Sony LIV is also ramping up its non-Hindi slate. The police procedural Brinda was in Telugu. Manvat Murders, based on a series of ritual murders from the early 1970s, is in Marathi. Upcoming shows will be in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Bengali, Saugata Mukherjee, Head of Content at Sony LIV, told Scroll. Here are excerpts from an interview.

What is the broad vision behind commissioning series, and has this changed over the years?

We started late in the streaming journey. We looked at what we could do differently from the others.

The stories that we picked were slightly more cerebral, authentic and rooted. I don’t think we have dithered much from that. If anything, we are making sure that we do the same in the other languages.

We programmed only in Hindi in the first three or four years, but the last two years have gone in developing shows in other languages. The Telugu show Brinda was a good start. We are programming in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi, and we’ve just started Bengali.

Different kinds of storytellers are being watched by a pan-Indian audience. This will augur well for consumers.

What are some of your upcoming titles?

There’s Manvat Murders, which has turned out really well. I'm very hopeful about Maya Sabha. It is set in Andhra Pradesh. It is the story of two friends who start out their political journey together and end up at the opposite ends of the spectrum. That journey also sort of encapsulates the journey of the state.

It’s been written and directed by Deva Katta. It is the most political show we have done after Maharani.

There is Madras Mystery by AL Vijay. It’s a period piece set in the 1940s and 1950s in Chennai. It’s based on a real case of a fallen star who was accused of bumping off a yellow journalist [the Lakshmikanthan murder case, in which the actors MK Thyagaraja Bhagvathar and NS Krishnan were the accused]. Nazriya Nazim plays the young lawyer.

There’s a new-age Tamil show called Love Story. There is a Malayalam show called Four-and-a-half Gang by Krishand, who directed the film Aavasavyuham. There’s another Malayalam show called Blindfold, about a wife’s journey to get her incarcerated husband out of jail on a case that was probably foisted on him.

We’ve also got some Bengali shows next year. One of them is Jazz City. Think Casablanca and a jazz bar in Kolkata in the 1970s during the liberation movement. There is also Ghore Pherar Gaan, about the cult Bengali band Moheneer Ghoraguli.

What kinds of viewers does Sony LIV series target?

We are very focused on the top tier, the premium viewer. Shows like Scam 1992, Rocket Boys, Tabbar, Maharani talk to the cohorts to whom we are speaking. Not everything works for everybody, but the fact is that we are making shows for a certain kind of audience set that is politically conscious and a conversation driver.

The streaming viewership is about 500 million, including YouTube. We are very focused on the top of the pyramid, so we’re looking at between 50 to 100 million viewers. We’re also looking at premium seekers beyond the big metros. At least 50 cities in the country have premium audiences.

The idea of the middle class has changed. Even slightly smaller cities have a premium audience, which is evolved and exposed to a lot of content. This audience set has lapsed out of television.

For instance, Maharani works in smaller cities as well, where viewers are politically conscious. They love the entertainment value of it, but also come to us to say how true-to-life the show is. The same goes for Scam and Rocket Boys.

Among all your shows, the most unusual is Rocket Boys, about the twinned trajectories of Homi J Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai amidst the development of the Indian space and nuclear programmes.

It was one of the first shows we commissioned. It is an unusual show to greenlight because you are talking about two scientists and the idea of nation building, the idea of India, through science. We wanted to tell the story of these two individuals but not make it didactic or preachy. We made some departures, but most of it was embedded in history.

We knew that it was going to be a headlining show, but would it reach a lot of people? After we launched, we realised that the show was reaching small towns and cities. In fact, season two did better than season one. This gave us the confidence to do Freedom at Midnight.

What can you tell us about Nikkhil Advani’s Freedom at Midnight, based on the book of the same name by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre?

It’s in post-production. It’s an expansive show. We were very clear that we wanted to stick to the book. We had taken the rights. The writers and Nikkhil Advani worked together very closely. We wanted to get the drama but also wanted to tell this history well.

We thought Rocket Boys would work only with certain kinds of people, but we saw that a lot of youngsters were watching. That gave us the gumption to do something like this. I hope it will watched by a lot of people in India. It’s about the heroes we talk about – Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel – a show about the making of the country.

Quite a few of your shows are recreations of key historical events – a risky proposition at present.

We have been very particular about the fact that we don’t go wrong – the facts need to be adhered to. When we are taking an adaptation, we religiously follow it. We tend to let showrunners and writers build worlds keeping in mind that they don’t dither away from the foundational material. Whatever is in the book should be in the show.

Indian history has a lot of stories to mine. We watch shows like The Crown all the time, but we haven’t made anything like it. It’s a tall claim, but it is something we aspire to.

One of our upcoming shows is Ram Madhvani’s Waking of a Nation, a revisionist history of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre [in Amritsar in 1919]. It’s a courtroom drama, the likes of which I don’t think we have seen in Indian streaming ever.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre is the focus, but the show is also an imagination of the event. The Hunter Commission Report [on the massacre] is the fulcrum. The story is also about friendship, about youngsters whose lives inadvertently changed because of that event. One of them is looking back to see what history can do to you.

The show took a while to write and shoot. It will come in the next couple of quarters.

There is chatter about belt-tightening at streaming platforms, shelved series and slashed budgets. How have the cutbacks affected Sony LIV?

I don’t think there’s been a tightening at our end. We have always been a little traditionalist and done less than necessary. That has probably held us in good stead. If anything, our catalogues have grown over the years, maybe not at the pace of the others, but incrementally and consistently.

Are we doing fewer shows than before? Clearly not. Are we more careful about the shows that we pick? Of course. That’s a bit of a learning that every streamer has had. Certain sweet spots worked for us, but some didn’t.

Is there a tightening of the purse in the general landscape? Yes, probably, I hear it all the time. This was bound to happen because there is only so much that you need. There was a little bit of surplus.

It sometimes appears that streaming platforms are throwing out more series and films than viewers can handle. Do streamers need to keep doing something new?

If you have an optimal number of shows and season returns, your audience set is mostly happy. You also need to give them something special every quarter, something that should excite them to be on Sony LIV or any other platform. We are also fortunate that we have interesting other catalogues, like premium soccer and premium tennis.

The number of shows hasn’t come down. But yes, if you were doing 16 or 17 shows a year in Hindi, that has been pared down to 12. However, we have added many more in other languages.

Brinda did very well. I was confident that the show would do well in Telugu and Tamil, but it has also done very well in Hindi.

As far as Hindi is concerned, we are not the ones who believe in throwing a lot and hoping the spaghetti will stick to the wall. We do less and try to do them well.

Some shows seem to go on forever. This is what television does, and this is what streaming said it wouldn’t do. When do you know when it is time to kill a series?

Globally, many shows have run into multiple seasons and done very well. Lots of subscribers are big fans of franchises.

We have had a fair amount of successes. Gullak will be in the fifth season, Maharani will run into the fourth season. Maharani still has a couple of more seasons. Scam will have a different story for the third season.

Unless you do a really bad job, a show can grow. But when there is no real story, you cannot make it organically grow.

Tabbar is one of the best shows we have done. We were very keen to do season two, but the writing wasn’t as great as season one. So we killed the show because we felt that it was best to have a great show rather than do just another season. We may do another season if we can find another story.

We did a lot of thinking on Rocket Boys too, but unfortunately, we didn't have another rocket boy. We needed to be excited about the story. There has to be a time when you have to say, this much and no more.