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Sudip Sharma, one of the few showrunner-creators in the Indian streaming industry, has spearheaded two of the most acclaimed shows of recent times – Paatal Lok, on Prime Video, and Kohrra, on Netflix. But in a new interview, he suggested that there is nothing but doom on the horizon as the streaming landscape implodes because of poor decision-making, self-censorship, and a lack of ambition. Appearing on The Streaming Show on Suchin Mehrotra’s YouTube channel, Sudip predicted that most streaming platforms will shut down in the next few years, leaving the few that survive with all the power to call the shots.
“I’m just 45. Will I be out of work?” he said rhetorically, as he predicted the death of ‘mid-budget shows’. He said, “I’ve been around for a while, but these are the darkest times I’ve seen. Not so much for me, personally. But things have really tightened down across the industry. If we didn’t have bad shows already, we’re going to have even worse shows coming out now… We’re going to replicate what’s happening in the West. I think it’s the mid-budget show which is going to die.”
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Sudip said that this puts him in a very precarious position, because this is the space he occupies. “The big, shiny shows are going to stay. If you put your money behind a star and it doesn’t work, you have an excuse. It’s the mid-budget show that’s going to get axed. So, we’re either going to have the Amazon Minis, or this new term that has started coming in of ‘TV plus’, which is as depressing as it sounds. It’s going to be either that or the big, shiny ones.”
Sudip said that there will probably be only a couple of major platforms in the future, but because there’ll be no competition, they’ll be able to dictate the terms. “And then what’ll happen is that the biggest of them – and we know who that is – will bring the price down to a level which everyone else will be forced to play at,” he said. Sudip also predicted that ‘incomes will come down’ going forward, but streamers will probably continue paying ‘obscene’ amounts to big names. “There are going to be a few star director-showrunners who will still command an obscene fee, which would be higher than the budgets most of us get for making our shows. But apart from that, even senior accomplished writers will see a dip…”
Sudip said that the ‘party is over’ just a few years after what seemed like a revolution. “There might be smaller parties in the future, but the arrival party is over. Peak TV is dead, it’s dead even in the West. But they had a good 10-year run, fuelled by the stock market more than anything else… Unfortunately, we were just getting started. We were in the sundowner when the party came to a halt,” he said.
Sudip is now preparing for the release of Paatal Lok season two, which remains among the most acclaimed Indian series to have emerged out of the first wave of streaming. He said that he will then start working on the second season of Kohrra, but will then stop working in the crime-drama space altogether.
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