Filmmaking duo Pushkar And Gayathri, directors of Tamil hits such as Oram Po and Vikram Vedha, have discovered a new love for long-form content ever since their debut as showrunners with Suzhal: The Vortex on Amazon Prime Video. Not only have they made the second season of the hit show, but they’ve also released another popular thriller series titled Vadhandhi: The Fable of Velonie. Exam, releasing on May 15, is their third series in Tamil. A story of two women, mistaken identities and the scam revolving around exam question paper leak, Exam stars Aditi Balan and Dushara Vijayan in starring roles.
Speaking about what they enjoy about the process of making shows over movies, Pushkar says, “For us, long-form content, just as an abstract idea, works very well. You get a lot of time to tell your story and structurally, you’re not limited to just one arc as your primary narrative arc. You have the room to expand multiple characters and sub-plots and they can then intermingle to reach new layers. When we start writing long-form, the joy of not being limited to 120 or 130 pages itself is exciting.”
Gayathri, adds that they’ve been ardent lovers of the series format, even before it became a thing on Indian television or OTT. “We begin most of our days by thinking of what series to watch," she says. "Even before social media, we had our ears to the ground to see what’s the next new show. That interest of watching long-form and then writing for it has been going on for long.”
They talk about the period two decades ago when they both discovered shows such as The Sopranos and The Wire, world-class titles that changed the definition of what they considered the peak of small screen content. “That’s where the era of prestige television began,” adds Pushkar, speaking of the time when they had both returned to India from a stint in the US. “We began to watch these and other HBO shows when people brought back DVD sets from the US. This was way before these shows began to get telecast on Indian television.”
It’s when the discovered the real scope of character exploration and the depths one could reach with a longer format. As Pushkar described earlier in an interview, he looks at series as novels when movies are best suited to be looked at short stories. Gayathri says, “In a film, you still have to stick within the limitations of a protagonist and antagonist format. There is not much scope, but if you go into a series like The Wire, season by season, you will notice of each season has a standalone theme. One is about the education system, one is about corruption…it really opened up our minds and that interest has sustained till today.”
This is the reason why they started work on writing Suzhal, even before OTTs “became a thing in India.”
“We just wanted to write it out freely. When we were done, although OTTs were just starting out, we did not feel like reducing the scope of the series to fit the format of a feature film,” Pushkar says. “That was something which we could easily have done and then pitch it as a film. But even then we were sure we wanted to hold on it as a long-form.”