AI generated summary, newsroom reviewed
An early title that Karan Johar was toying with, for a chat show he wanted to host, was ‘Karan Affairs’, a pun on current affairs. It was the early 2000s.
“The idea of hosting a talk show was marinating in his head for a few years, since Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001),” Niranjan Iyengar, Johar’s friend and collaborator on the first few seasons, tells THR India, “He had access, and he knew how entertaining the actors were when there was no filter. Besides, the stars still had some mystery.” Every time Johar brought it up, though, Iyengar would discourage him, “I told him it was a journalistic thing, and you are a filmmaker. But Karan being Karan, he didn’t give up.”
Around the same time Fazila Allana, co-founder and Managing Director of Sol Productions—who were making a name for themselves in the reality television and live events space—reached out to Johar. They wanted him to anchor the Star Parivaar Awards. Johar laughed it off, and, instead, proposed the idea of his own talk show. Allana, convinced, began working on the concept. Parallelly, Star approached Johar for a project, and the show fell into place—quickly, without fuss.
Koffee With Karan premiered on 19 November 2004 on Star World. His first two guests were Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol, the lead pair from Johar’s first two films, but also, his dear friends. “That episode really established the DNA of the show,” Johar tells THR India, “There was warmth, friendship, humour, and absolutely no formality. It felt like three friends having a conversation, which was exactly what I wanted Koffee With Karan to be.” The first season, in fact, was mostly populated by people Johar was intimately familiar with. The set design of the first season was even meant to resemble a New York loft. There was a charmed voyeurism, a performative authenticity about these conversations.
“When we started Koffee With Karan in 2004, I knew I wanted it to be different from anything audiences had seen before,” Johar tells THR India, “Simi Garewal had created something iconic, elegant, and intimate [with Rendezvous With Simi Garewal], but I wanted my show to feel like a conversation in my living room. Informal, irreverent, spontaneous, and occasionally outrageous.”
The conversations, for all their wit and warmth, weren’t scripted, neither was there a long pipeline of ideation and approval. “Karan thought of something, he had the wherewithal, and we landed up on set,” Iyengar notes, “The first season was entirely organic—stars were unbothered about what they were saying, didn’t care about the edit, or if things would land them in trouble. It was largely an enhanced reproduction of what used to happen.”
Johar was inspired by “the conversational ease of international talk shows. With that in mind, I wanted to give my show a distinctly Indian personality.” Perhaps, the fact that Johar was an insider, in the thick of things, worked in the show’s favour. “Simi had also tried to do it, but by the time she did Rendezvous, she was a bit of an outsider,” Iyengar notes.
For Johar, though, the idea of an insider interviewing other insiders was the “biggest risk."
"Who knew, that familiarity would become our greatest strength. We weren’t trying to unravel the mystery of movie stars; we were simply letting audiences see them as people, with all their humour, contradictions and vulnerabilities,” Johar expresses.
To make things sputtering, the “Rapid Fire” round was added. “Initially we had a few AVs as well, on the guests—people talking about them, common people, celebrities,” Allana notes.
Even the pairings in these early seasons were often strange. Sanjay Leela Bhansali was paired with Mallika Sherawat. Shabana Azmi was paired with Shobhaa De. Johar brought in Rakhi Sawant. He brought in Konkana Sensharma. He brought in directors—Rakesh Roshan, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Kunal Kohli, and Rajkumar Hirani in one episode—and also kept an entire episode for Richard Gere. He didn’t pretend to be above the discourse. He roped in Sakshi Tanwar and Smriti Irani as guests and spoke to them without any condescension, only a kind, and occasionally frivolous curiosity.
A talk show takes the personality of the host. Johar’s reveling in gossip became essential to the show’s lore. He would ask actors to rank other actors in order of sex appeal. There was a mean streak in the rapid fire questions. Many took the bait, and those who didn’t withered into boredom.
In Season 3, Deepika Padukone said Ranbir Kapoor should endorse a condom brand. Season 4’s official tagline was “Behind the Scenes. Beneath the Sheets”. Johar would play matchmaker, and he revelled in fissures. He would needle his guests to out secrets he already was privy to. Some would relent, but most wouldn’t, and their silence spoke volumes. Often, Johar’s questions were their own answers.
The landscape the show was milking—that of cinema, stardom—though, was being overhauled. Naturally, the show also had to evolve with the changing landscape. Instagram debuted in 2010. By the time season 4 rolled along, in 2013, stardom began to feel accessible.
“Our biggest competition became Instagram,” Jahnvi Obhan, initially the creative director and now showrunner of Koffee With Karan tells THR India, “Because you have access to them from their morning routine to what is happening in their bedroom. The mystery surrounding stardom began to fade.”
They played around with the format, game-ifying the structure. In season 4, there was a quiz round with a buzzer. The episode with Kareena Kapoor Khan and Ranbir Kapoor had a segment, “How Well Do You Know The Kapoors?” The buzzer was replaced by sounds the actors had to make in season 5. For season 6, there was a podium in a “gaming area”, a separate section on the Koffee set. The set expanded.
“Today, celebrities are everywhere, but ironically, they’re also far more guarded. So we constantly had to reinvent the conversations, the pairings, the games and the tone,” Johar notes.
“By season 6, we were struggling because social media really hit us,” Obhan notes, “That is also when we introduced “Hey It’s Me” [where the guests have to call famous people on their contact list, and make them say ‘Hey Karan, it’s me’]. Let’s hear how actors talk to and address each other. That became a big hit!” Brands, too, flocked for attention. “While they were always there, they would come as supers. Active integration started from season 6,” Obhan notes.
The show’s cultural impact, in fact, broadened with social media. “Think of Kangana’s massive cultural impact, with the whole nepotism debate. I remember asking Karan about what to do with those sections during the edit. He said keep it, of course. And the rest is history. It changed the way conversations took place in the industry,” Obhan notes.
Similarly, Alia Bhatt not knowing India’s president haunted her. Cricketers Hardik Pandya and KL Rahul were too loose-tongued, their comments sparking furore—the episode had to be taken off-air and BCCI had to drop the players for a few matches. Salman Khan’s fabled virginity became parodic lore. The show’s imprint was outsized, untouched by the cultural overhaul.
As the seasons progressed, though, that initial intimacy was swapped for something grander. The distance between his seat and the couch felt longer. The sets were brighter, as the cameras moved from SD to HD, and now 4K. Stardom, too, irrevocably changed, with social media, as did Johar—and so, the show, too, exploded.
“The purest Koffee seasons were the initial ones because we didn’t have too many people on set telling us what to do, and we all know how many people are on set these days advising us—PR teams, managers, legal teams, s&p, and what felt like their entire extended family,” Obhan notes.
Increasingly, the past few seasons of the show became testament to how boring our stars really are, shorn of edge, wit, and that masti that kept their image translucent, if not shimmering. And yet, the show has carved for itself a place any talk show would only be envious of. When Rashmika Mandanna and Vijay Deverakonda came on his couch—after a circuit of promotional interviews as a freshly married couple—their romance was scrutinized so ruthlessly they had to issue a clarification that they, indeed, love each other.
The smallest of gestures and pauses and mis-steps are magnified. It was a re-treading of the meltdown around the Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh episode—where their marriage, too, was put under the scanner. What is this deep, invasive curiosity for objects that have lost their compelling shine?
“I don’t think the fascination with movie stars will ever disappear. What has changed is how audiences consume celebrity culture,” Johar notes. If stardom was the thing one yearned to be in the company of, today, stardom is that which one feels compelled to pass judgment over—and Koffee With Karan rode that wave from the former to the latter, unscathed.
The decision, then, to place the shutters on Koffee With Karan after nine seasons, might point to something poignant. “Koffee With Karan belonged to a certain cultural moment, and it evolved beautifully over two decades. I also believe it’s important to recognise when a format needs to pause or reinvent itself. The show became a reflection of how our film industry and its stars evolved over the years,” Johar notes.
Even as we consume stardom differently, and even as Johar’s own career took him in many-splendoured directions, the show might have run its course. Perhaps, the cost of evolving with the evolving landscape was too much. Or, perhaps, more pertinently, not worth it.