Something shifted in our collective psyche on July 3, 2000. As the new millennium churned over, Star Plus, which was precipitously lagging behind Zee and Sony, launched two new shows. The first, at 9 pm, was Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) — a game-show based on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire — hosted by Amitabh Bachchan. This was followed, at 10:30 pm, by Ekta Kapoor’s soap opera Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi.
Both would immediately shovel Star onto the top of the television pile, with long legs that would reach the 2020s, and in their footprints leave television forever changed. “In the 1990s, when satellite TV just started, everybody was experimenting, be it Hansal Mehta’s Khana Khazana with Sanjeev Kapoor, Siddhartha Basu’s quiz show, Sa Re Ga Ma, late night talk shows like Movers & Shakers and later, Rendezvous with Simi Garewal,” media executive and producer Sameer Nair, who was heading programming at Star at that time, tells THR India. “We were looking at how to rock the boat.”
In that pursuit, KBC was the first sledgehammer — a quiz show that was not only going to be put on prime time, but also released as a weekday daily. Nair was hell bent on bringing Big B to the small screen, as host but also as someone to set the tone of the show. The international versions of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire were often hosted by talk-show hosts. That would not do here, for Star had to sell the idea of a quiz show, creating a public demand for it, as opposed to merely tapping into some latent, pre-existing public interest. The Indian imagination was being sculpted from scratch.
“Bachchan was the only actor with that kind of proficiency in both Hindi and English,” Nair notes. “But more importantly, this was going to homes, where the remote is controlled by the mother. For that mother, it was Bachchan who was the beloved hero, not Shah Rukh Khan—who was catering to a younger generation.” To convince Bachchan, Nair and him flew to London to witness the taping of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?. Seeing the scale of the production, Bachchan, who was on the fence until then, inked the deal.
KBC was produced at the same scale as the American and British versions. “It was at least ten times more expensive than any show on Indian television—a dazzling production, staying completely true to the original, the exact same layout,” Nair notes.
Given Bachchan’s inclusion, a man who looked just as comfortable in a suit as in a bandhgala, the “Indian-ising” of the show was to be expected, right from his opening monologue—which the international versions did not have—to him calling the computer “computerji”, and his eloquent shuttling between Hindi and English without drawing attention to that switch. “Even the questions had large elements of Indian mythology and history,” Nair notes.
Leading up to the show’s release, however, there was deep doubt all around. Bachchan, who was in deep debt and was struggling to stage his return after an acting sabbatical, was also advised against this. “There was the sense that in the history of bad ideas, this was going to be the worst. ‘Who puts a quiz show on prime time? Kahan se Amit-ji ko laye hain? Indians don’t even like this!’” Nair recalls.
The success was immediate and palpable. Nair remembers walking the streets of Mumbai, emptied out at 9 pm, where all you could hear was the theme song of KBC. With 130 episodes, roughly hour-long each, the rapturous first season went on for six months.
Two things shifted. One is that reality television was now seen as prime real estate on television, upon which the whole family could descend. Second, with Bachchan hosting, “TV was legitimatised for Bollywood,” Nair notes. The presence of big stars on these shows brought them not just the viewers, but the advertisers, too. The scales were tilting.
Over the aughts, the landscape quickly matured, with reality shows sprouting all round, and media companies descended to stake their claim as India was rapidly modernising. In 2006, Endemol, a Dutch-origin media company behind some of the most popular reality TV formats, like Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, Fear Factor, and Family Feud, made landfall in India. Deepak Dhar, who was producing shows at MTV and Star TV, joined Endemol in a bid to become not just a producer, but an entrepreneur.
“Across networks, it was pretty much the same kind of content, the same kitchen politics. It felt wallpaper-ish,” Dhar tells THR India. “Then came the thought of pushing the reality bar—back then we didn’t even call it reality television.” His first stab at disruption was bringing Big Brother to India. First, he added a ‘g’ to the ‘Big‘—a bit of superstition. Then, he replaced ‘Brother’ with ‘Boss’—his bid to make the show’s title more resonant to the Indian ear. The Dutch were confused. Why would you pay top dollar to acquire a known name across territories, and then tinker with its brand, changing its name?
Featuring 14 contestants locked in a house for three months under 24-hour surveillance—no access to telephones or television or the outer world—where each week, one of them is voted out, the show was ripe for Indian success. With over 30 snooping cameras, whose footage was closely being watched by story editors working eight-hour shifts to spin arcs around small skirmishes and incidents, this was an altogether new pipeline of television production.
Dhar’s bid to create “anti-TV” with Bigg Boss was, however, made within the ambit of Indian morality and censorship. It would be disruptive in its tone and tenor, but it would not go as far as the Australian or European versions did, vis-à-vis sexuality or profanity. Dhar was clear that “it had to feel like a rooted Indian show, a reality version of our daily soaps.” Meanwhile, Ekta Kapoor, through her army of K-serials that began with Kyunki, had successfully built the script for what the daily soap can look like—that script was borrowed in this next era of reality television, that of kalesh (conflict) cringe.
Bigg Boss was cast accordingly—“one mother, one senior citizen, one girl next door, one brat, one philosophical or principled person, etc.,” Dhar notes. The house’s design, too, was important, for it had to feel like “we were giving you a peek into your neighbour’s home on prime time.”
Who would anchor this blitzkrieg? Internationally, Dhar notes, “Big Brother does not have celebrities hosting.” For the first season, they got Arshad Warsi, and for the second season Shilpa Shetty—who had just come out of Big Brother, where as a contestant she stirred the pot of British racism, with fellow contestant Jade Goody’s nasty remarks flung at her. In a casting coup, Bigg Boss got Goody to come as a contestant for the season Shetty hosted. When introducing her, Shetty told the crowd, “Let’s welcome our next guest with the warmth that is our true Indian tradition.”
For the third season, they got Amitabh Bachchan to host, but it was the fourth season, with Salman Khan—“Bhai” as he was called by his fans, anyway— in 2010-11 that spiralled the show’s reach, with record high TRPs. The show’s finale received a TRP of 6.7. They even launched a mobile video-game based on this season.
Soon, Bollywood actors started coming to the sets of these shows to promote their films, the way they would also come as guest appearances on soaps, increasing porosity between the big and small screen.
A new paradigm was upon us. As Nair notes, “TV as an industry became the dominant media industry in the 2000s. It overtook print and definitely dwarfed Bollywood in sheer size, scale, and revenue.” TV and Bollywood had a symbiotic relationship—with satellite rights and music rights, TV also became a significant revenue stream for Bollywood. “Even big film awards, like IIFA, launched in 2000, became big TV properties,” Nair notes.
As new channels mushroomed, so did new reality show formats. In 2007, Nair joined NDTV Imagine, which was one of the three channels that launched around the same time, including Colours and 9X. The landscape had exploded. “When we launched KBC, India had 25 million cable satellite homes. By the time NDTV Imagine launched, there were about 90 million cable satellite homes, almost 4X,” Nair notes.
Everyone was nosing around for another disruption, another Bigg Boss. Shows like Rakhi Ka Swayamvar started popping up, “like the Bachelorette, but without the bikini, and mushtandas doing push-ups with her sitting on them. We did an ethnic version,” Nair notes. Shows like Splitsvilla on MTV—following in the footsteps of Roadies, catering to a younger crowd—challenged the grammar of reality television, causing a moral panic.
Dhar bought the rights for Fear Factor, “an MTV-kind of show, more niche”, and “made it mass—calling it ‘Darr Ka Naya Blockbuster: Khatron Ke Khiladi’. For me, if it doesn’t go mainstream, it has no value.”
Ashvini Yardi, who was at the time programming head at Colors, notes in Shoma Munshi’s Remote Control: Indian Television in the New Millennium that they began a disruptive scheduling, “Put[ting] reality shows like Bigg Boss and Fear Factor: Khatron Ke Khiladi in the prime time slots to compete with Star Plus’s successful Kyunki and Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii.” As YouTube arrived, in 2008, these shows ripened further, footage being circulated beyond the television—take the now iconic spat between Pooja Misrra and Shonali Nagrani, “Pooja, what is this behaviour?”, from Bigg Boss season 5, in 2011.
Through this, what Nair calls “the old horses”—KBC, Indian Idol, Nach Baliye— continued, even as they pivoted in their narratives. For the fifth season of KBC (2011), for example, they went scouring for contestants from small towns and villages across India. They were no longer looking for just people—but stories. Snapshots of their lives were shown. Talent shows, too, doubled down on the backstories of their contestants. The journalist Anil Thakraney succinctly concluded, “Tears of the poor. Entertainment for the rich.”
Actors were also becoming more amenable to being seen on television. Khatron Ke Khiladi experimented with Priyanka Chopra Jonas as the host, but when the ratings dipped, they went back to Kumar. After experimenting with Shah Rukh Khan for one season, KBC returned to Bachchan. Knock-offs would also sputter and, then, disappear—Sawaal Dus Crore Ka on Zee TV, anchored by Anupam Kher and Manisha Koirala; Jeeto Chappar Phaad Ke on Sony, anchored by Govinda.
Aamir Khan, too, would make his small screen debut with Satyamev Jayate in 2012, tackling sensitive social topics from homophobia to female foeticide, from alcoholism to rape. Social commentator Santosh Desai wrote, “The most remarkable thing about Satyamev Jayate is that it takes everything that the market swears is commercial disaster, repackages it and forces the same market to pay obeisance.” By 2012, all the three Khans—who were ruling the roost of the 1990s silver screen—had made landfall on the small screen. What was small? Which was big? Who even knew anymore.
Around those years, Dhar also experimented with a “midnight stream of Bigg Boss. We opened up the tapes from the house and ran it—contestants opening the refrigerator, snoring, chatting, drinking, etc., like a security camera view of the house.” Despite not promoting it, people stayed up late to watch it, and they had to keep the stream running for 3.5-4 hours. “That was the dawning of the fact that we were caging Bigg Boss,” Dhar notes. The show went regional—with versions in Kannada and Bengali in 2013. More would follow as the 2010s progresses. Bigg Boss is currently being made in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bangla, and Marathi. Dhar also announced Bigg Boss’ expansion to include Bhojpuri and Punjabi languages. On Sony, Madhuri Dixit Nene will front Kon Honar Crorepati, the Marathi edition of the Kaun Banega Crorepati, A.R. Rahman will lead Tamil Idol, the first Tamil-language version of the singing competition format. Television is still ruling the roost, even as a new entrant, dressed in suede shoes and a leather jacket, makes a wildcard entry—streaming.
Streaming changed reality television, but also, streaming was changed by reality television. When Amazon Prime Video and Netflix launched in India in 2016, both began developing their unscripted slate in parallel with their scripted slate, with packaged shows like Comicstaan (2018) on Amazon Prime Video and Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives (2020) on Netflix. Captive reality shows, however, where unkempt personalities are unleashed as daily drip feeds, is a recent shift, post-pandemic.
It is a seismic change, for streaming, once considered an alternative to television, is now being re-framed as TV+, dabbling in the very shows that revolutionized television. It began with Big Boss OTT—the first season, in 2021, streamed on Voot, the second and third season going to JioHotstar, where they even did a 24×7 coverage. After three seasons, they scrapped Big Boss OTT, going back to their digital-first model, where the same episode premiered first on OTT, and then on television.
Amazon Prime Video came up with The Traitors in 2025, and Alliance in 2026. As competition, Netflix’s Lock Upp released alongside Alliance. This required the platforms to shift away from the binge model.
“Alliance is, in fact, our first-ever daily reality show,” Nikhil Madhok, Director and Head of Originals, Prime Video (SVOD) and Amazon MGM Studios India, tells THR India: “It was a complete re-engineering of the product,”
Tanya Bami, the Series Head of Netflix India, tells THR India, “We are inherently a binge model, and this is one of our first daily launches across the world. There was extensive DI, sound-mixing, subtitling—maintaining the quality standards—with a 72-hour turnaround.” Netflix India, in fact, began with Lock Upp dropping five days a week, but by popular demand, they extended it by a day. “By the last two weeks we went through all seven days. We have also evolved it on the go as we constructed it,” Bami notes. Netflix has even let go of their exclusivity clause, with Samay Raina’s India’s Got Latent streaming both on the platform and on Raina’s YouTube channel.
On streaming, the shows looked different, raking in the + in TV+. “In The Traitors, for example, the grandeur and atmosphere of Suryagarh Palace in Rajasthan have become an important part of the viewing experience. Or, if you look at the double-storied set design for Alliance as well as the bespoke tasks area, it is very different from anything else and yet relevant to the format,” Madhok notes.
Similarly, Bami notes, for Lock Upp, they wanted to achieve a certain look, “young, international, and dynamic—whether it is the uniforms and the neck collar, which looks comfortable and cool, but not over-glamorous, or Omung Kumar’s minimalist yet striking set design, or even things like the digital pantry where the conveyor belt is bringing the food.” If the first season of Bigg Boss had 30+ cameras, Lock Upp, like the latest season of Bigg Boss, has 90+ cameras.
These shows have a much shorter run—Alliance and Lock Upp ran for six weeks, while The Traitors will run for three weeks, compared to Bigg Boss, which runs for around 15 weeks. But even within this narrow mandate, they have turned streaming platforms into a private television—with regular habit formation, as opposed to ephemeral binge addiction.
This shift in strategy bears out in the data. Solely based on the first quarter of 2026, “Reality Shows had the second highest share of cumulative viewership (excluding sports) at 23%, ahead of web-series and films at 19% each,” Keerat Grewal, Head - Business Development (Streaming, TV & Brands) at Ormax India, tells THR India.
The success of these shows are already pushing them into multiple seasons, multiple languages. The second season of The Traitors has been launched. A Telugu adaptation hosted by Teja Sajja is in the pipeline.
Some of the “old horses” even survived streaming. KBC, retaining its television spot, is also being streamed on SonyLIV. In 2018, during the tenth season, they introduced a “KBC Play Along” feature on the app to mobilise audience participation. “[Sony Entertainment] is a multi-platform as a business, across television, OTT, YouTube, and social media,” Harsh Sheth, Business Head at Sony Entertainment Television, tells THR India. To keep up with the age of AI, they partnered with Google Gemini for the latest season—the eighteenth. “From testing general knowledge to testing the application of knowledge, the questions have evolved,” Sheth notes.
In fact, an expansion of reality television is underfoot. Over the last few seasons of KBC, the episode duration has increased to ninety minutes. The latest season will have 120 episodes, compared to 100 episodes last year. “Yes, both the quantum and the diversity of our non-fiction programming has increased,” Sheth confirms. Now, for example, we have 800 days of Bigg Boss collectively in a calendar year. Nothing seems to slow down the breakneck pace at which these shows are let loose on the Indian imagination.
In the future, we might even have AI shows, Dhar hints during our conversation. Micro-dramas, too, is a form that will soon find itself amenable to reality shows. Whether these breakneck innovations will break the format, splinter it, diversify it, or cannibalise it, what is clear is that people like watching people, and there is nothing we can do to tire us of ourselves—yet. The old horses shall keep striding into the bleary-eyed sunset.