Reporters Review: Please send makers of Rajeev Khandelwal's new show DVDs of Newsroom

The first episode of Sony’s new fiction show on journalists, Reporters, was followed by the first episode of the new season of Mad Men on Star World Premiere. One recreates the world of current day journalists in India, which should be pretty easy to research and recreate. The other recreates the world of advertising in America in the ’70s, which one would assume would be far more difficult to get right. Watching these two shows back to back felt like going from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Reporters is the second show this  month to focus on the media. The first was Those Dilli Wali Thakur Gurls, which if compared to Reporters, seems like an award-winning documentary show. Reporters is one of those programmes that makes a case for Indian serials steering clear of originality and instead, faithfully copying foreign serials. By the end of the first two episodes – 44 minutes of my life which will never return – I felt like speed posting the entire DVD collection of The Newsroom to director Goldie Behl and his scriptwriters. And gifting actor Rajeev Khandelwal some Isabgol.

With all that is happening in Indian media today – corporates buying media houses, editors jumping ship, digital news outlets mushrooming like zits on Adrian Mole’s face, editors not being able to separate their journalism from their politics, everyone hating on Arnab Goswami, journalists whining and fighting on Twitter in equal measure -   you would think that writing a show on Indian journalism would be the easiest thing to do. You simply have to read the news and follow social media for 30 minutes to come up with at least 50 ideas for an episode. Some of them might even be unique.

Unfortunately, it seems that instead of doing any practical research, the scriptwriters of Reporters watched other dodgy Hindi serials for inspiration. As a result, the first episode of Reporters was essentially a mash-up of Diya Aur Bati Hum-meets-India TV.

What stops Indian television scriptwriters, directors and producers from actually studying or even paying perfunctory attention to the subjects on which they’ve decided to make an entire show? Reporters could have been India’s answer to The Newsroom, which was admittedly self-righteous and had its own share of fictional journalism. However, despite its loopholes, it dished out excellent dialogues, debates, scandals and a running commentary on current issues like the rise (and sometimes scourge) of digital media, Occupy Wall Street and that infamous episode (which now seems prophet-like, after Rolling Stone’s retraction) about pre-interviewing a rape victim before carrying her story to ensure she wasn’t making it up. Aside from being topical, every character in The Newsroom was excellently sketched out. In fact Jeff Daniels’s Will McAvoy could be Arnab Goswami’s doppelgänger. Why couldn’t we create a show of a similar calibre?

Admittedly, the tag line of Reporters should have prepared me for what was to come my way. Any show on journalists that uses the slogan, “Khabar…Dil se…Dil tak” is bound to be painful. The posters for the new show had Rajeev Khandelwal and Kritika Kamra, mid-sprint, holding mics in their hand. Are they running away from the show?

From the first episode, we can conclude that Reporters is about not journalism, but the romance that is scheduled to blossom between Khandelwal and Kamra’s characters. Khandelwal is Kabir Sharma, a firebrand reporter/ editor (it is not clear precisely what he is) who appears to head a newspaper called Dilli Kranti. He also gives guest lectures at the Indian School of Journalism, during which he likens serving news to drug addiction. When a student asks Kabir whether journalists use tricks like a drug addict does in order to get away with addiction, Kabir replies, “Of course they do.”

Woah! Cue dramatic music!

Cut to Ananya (Kritika Kamra) who is a junior reporter in a news channel and hero worships Kabir. The editor of her channel gets screamed at by the owner for doing a human interest story. This is followed by one of the news producers flirting with the news anchor, who lets the viewer know that the amorous news producer (who doesn’t really seem to have a proper role in the news room) is actually the daughter of the man who owns the channel.

By the way, the news anchor looks startlingly like Zee News’ Sudhir Chaudhary (and in the second episode displays similar ethics as him). He also tells the news channel owner’s daughter that he’ll cook her chicken at night and that he has a bottle of wine at home. Gripping, gritty journalism, this is.

Meanwhile, Ananya gets a tip-off that a married minister is getting married to a young girl against her wishes. She and her cameramen reach the farmhouse where this dubious wedding is taking place and there, Ananya spots Kabir with his camera, clearly investigating the same story. (An editor taking his own pictures? How Sanjoy Narayan-like.)

The episode ends with Ananya and cameraman getting caught by the minister’s guards, while Kabir walks off into the night. He’s last seen playing catch with what seems to be the negatives of the pictures he took. What he’s doing with negatives in the age of digital cameras, no one knows. Maybe he just keeps a roll of film in his pocket for nostalgia value, and to look cool while walking away from farmhouses.

Kabir says a very prescient sentence at one point in Reporters: “Sachai, achhai aur kamyabi kabhi saath nehi chal sakte.” Whether or not that is true of journalism, it certainly does seem to sum up Reporters.

In all fairness, the show improved in the second episode. Ananya’s story is killed by the amorous news anchor, who leaks it to the bigamous politician. The politician ensures the scandalous story is dropped. However, Kabir, being the journalist extraordinaire that he is, carries the story on the front page of Dilli Kranti, only to have his newspaper’s office attacked by goons.

After the entire office has been gutted and his colleagues have been injured, Kabir announces he’s decided to join the channel where Ananya works. A real team player obviously. Why the shift from newspaper to television news? Kabir says he wants to be where “power” is — you’d think he might want to ponder on that point considering Dilli Kranti used his story on page one while the news channel squashed the same story, but god forbid the journalists in Reporters actually think through things.

Meanwhile, Ananya rushes to cover the attack on the _Dilli Krant_i office and meets Kabir. She is too shy to question him on camera. This is when we’re supposed to fall in love with them. He’s a self-serving, perpetually-unsmiling journalist. She’s a lovestruck novice. How can you possibly resist these characters’ charm?

Despite the improved storyline of the second episode, there is not much in Reporters that seems factual. Whether it’s the television journalists’ makeup room or the way reporters from news channels record something surreptitiously, or the portrayal of media magnates (they don’t really practice their golf putt in their office during prime time news), everything in the show is fiction and often, it’s also laughable. Why does Kabir, a star editor who runs an entire newspaper, not have a cameraman or a spycam? Why are there no edit meetings? Why do junior reporters zoom off to cover a story with their cameraman without being briefed by their editors? Why is the news channel owner’s secret lover cooking her only chicken at night?  Not only is this fictional, it’s also badly written. You simply don’t end up caring for the issues or the characters.

The only silver lining is that at least Reporters made some attempt at showing the journalist-politician nexus that is prevalent in India. Also, wittingly or unwittingly, it shows the love that many print journalists have for being on camera. Unfortunately, both these points are tangential, and the focus is on Khandelwal looking pie-faced into the camera while the doe-eyed Kamra gazes adoringly at him.

Instead of pretending to be “hard-hitting”, maybe it would be wiser for TV producers to stick to what they’re good at – emotional family dramas that  strike a deadly balance between sexism and over-acting. Ekta Kapoor has made an art out of it after all and is laughing her way to the bank for decades now. Goldie Behl may have been wise to follow in her footsteps. For Khandelwal’s sake, I hope this show does more for him than Behl’s last magnum opus, Drona, did for Abhishek Bachchan’s career.

You can watch Reporters from Mon-Thurs at 9pm on Sony. Firstpost is owned by Network 18 which also owns Colours that is in direct competition with Sony.