Taking five-year ‘leaps’

Popular serial Bade Acche Lagte Hai has just fast forwarded by five years and the lead couple played by Sakshi Tanwar and Ram Kapoor are blessed with five-year-old kids. Mann Ki Awaaz Pratigya also went in for a five-year-leap, six months ago and had Pratigya (Pooja Gor) donning a maternal avatar. Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata regularly has an eight-nine month leap or even lesser and that too quite often, while Amrit Manthan, a relatively new show just took a six-month leap with a major twist in the story line. The lead girl Amrit now has a new face!

Generation leaps are a tried and tested success recipe for a serial whose storyline is saturated, ratings have hit rock bottom and viewer fatigue has set in. It was the ‘K’ serials, that made the concept a big hit. Since then leaps have become a part and parcel of soaps, not just the long-running ones, but also those that have hardly completed a year on air. Even the span of the leap has reduced drastically.

Earlier serials would fast forward by 15-years or more, today it has come down to five years and in certain cases as less as five-six months! Is this a way to retain actors, who are wary of donning grey and playing older characters? Sakshi doesn’t think so.

“Actors have no say in these creative decisions. Also, it is always challenging to play different shades in a single character,” she contends. However, Pooja begs to differ. “No actor would want to put a whitener in the hair and  play a mother or father to actors close to their age, which the producers have understood. Also, the audience wants to see the same faces as leads with whom the show started off.  Thus a gradual leap of four-five years, where you show the lead couple with a kid is fine. More than that is a huge risk as the audience may lose interest.”

Prashaant Bhatt, weekday programming head, Colors, avers,
“To ensure that connect to the story and the characters is not broken, shorter leaps are introduced. In case of Balika Vadhu, to showcase the growing up years of Anandi and Jagya and to move the story forward while making way for newer content, we introduced a leap of just five years.”

Shorter or longer, (Uttaran recently jumped ahead by 18-years) leaps are a way of introducing a fresh element and drama to the story. New characters are introduced to change the dynamics of story-telling. For instance in Bade Acche... Sameer Kocchar has recently made an entry to spice up things, while Mohan Kapur has been added to Amrit Manthan to create intrigue and most importantly Dimple Jhangiani has been replaced by Ankita Sharma as Amrit! Go figure.