The Broken News largely delivers what it sets out to

TV news is a poisonous business. You don’t really need cultural artefacts to confirm that fact for you. Try and sit through an hour of primetime television and you can probably feel the crispness of the throbbing veins that pulse through anchors bursting at their seams. The dark side of media isn’t exactly a novel premise but Zee5’s The Broken News does familiar things well, foremost of which happened before the series even started shooting – the casting of Jaideep Ahlawat.  The series is a dive into the everyday business of news broking, as it sees it, through two channels that differ vastly in tone, pitch and approach. There is not a lot that’s new in The Broken News - the same hairy deals, sex tapes, blackmailing journalists and spiny youngsters. What’s new perhaps is the fact that the series knows that making and delivering news are often the same and though morally repulsive, thrilling nonetheless. This is news tv as if it were a soap. And it delivers what it sets out to – entertainment. The series is anchored, quite literally in this case, by Ahlawat and Sonali Bendre as rival news heads and TV anchors. While Bendre’s Amina Qureshi is scrupulous about how news is approached and/or packaged Ahlawat’s Sanyal is a narcissistic snob with the flexibility and vulnerability of a steel door. “Swarg jaane ke liye marna padta hai,” Sanyal whispers to a woman live on his show. In another scene he confirms to his estranged wife that news is more important to him than her. Under these two media personalities there are a host of characters fighting their own little battles. Shriya Pilgaonkar (Radha), who has been everywhere of late, fits the part of a young tv producer trying to also be a ‘good journalist’. Other than the day-to-day stories that these rival channels chase, there is also the consequent mystery of Radha’s roommate, who was killed in a fire accident unless her friend can prove otherwise.

The Broken News, as the title suggests is a narrative image of the many ways in which news television has compromised journalism and ultimately its own relevance. Stories are manufactured, resources forged, people forced into complying with things they rather wouldn’t and more. What the series also expresses rather eloquently is that power or at least the power of the media, gets to the heads of the people who run it. In a brilliant scene, Qureshi, after she has just delivered a knock-out show asks her team, rather chillingly to embrace her authority or succumb under it. “Never question me again,” she says before asking them to ‘get out’. The Broken News is smart enough to get into the workings of news channels, of how they are run financially and politically, but stutters with their designs. Interviews are so casually requested and given, it would make anyone from the media, including me, feel incompetent and jealous. An arc in the series shows Sanyal eye-balling ministers with the confidence of a leopard counting chickens in a well. It takes the stilted machoism of this industry a tad too far, because even though we’ve seen it inside newsrooms, in front of the bureaucracy, tones change drastically. Sonali Bendre adequately pulls her weight in the series and so do other actors but its eventually Ahlawat’s ice-cold brutalism that runs through the series even when he is not on screen. Sanyal is a cliché – the successful man torn between personal and professional life, his morality a matter of motivation, and yet, his brokenness, his baffling inhumanity feels tragic at times. Sanyal is both the anchor and the prophet of the series, and it’s his cynicism that the world around him seems to always be fighting against. Even in story arcs where he is not present, his icy delivery of truisms looms with the weight of inevitability. Ahlawat was on the other side of the fence in Pataal Lok, and here he is on the right side of the fence. It’s what ratchets the tension and makes the series, despite its familiar ropes, feel like a fresh bout between right and wrong, greed and aspiration, friendship and work. The problem with The Broken News is that its franticness makes it impossible to adsorb anything emotionally relevant. There is little here to root for, except for stories that you’d like to the watch see the light of day. The personal lives, though visible, never quite click because they are trampled under the pace of the show and its desire to make each episode about a newsbreak. Ironically, that’s also part of the point here, that the ludicrous indignity of working in this profession rarely matches the emotional and financial cost of working in its lower ranks. Only the most illustrious look the shiniest here. The rest are covered in dust and dung. It’s something the series fails to comment upon, but in terms of thrill and entertainment, this Jaideep Ahlawat shouldered newsroom drama delivers. Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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