The Formulaic Future of Indian Streaming: 'Engagement' Points, Unnecessary Deaths And Algorithm-Driven Storytelling

“Someone has to die within the first five minutes of a show,” an executive from a production house tells The Hollywood Reporter India under conditions of anonymity. That was a categorical note he got from a studio executive: Begin at the end; hook your viewer; sink with them.

Dabba Cartel, Aranyak, Class, Mai, and Kohrra on Netflix, Pataal Lok season 2 on Amazon Prime Video, Maharani season 2 on SonyLIV, and Rudra: The Edge of Darkness on Disney+ Hotstar (now JioHotstar) — all of them begin smeared with blood, smelling of spilt iron. All thrillers, made with a range of artistry — one could argue that this inaugural violence is a pressure applied by the genre itself. But if a genre is being disproportionately represented in the platform’s slate, one could also argue, this is a demand made by the platform.

The idea of an “inciting incident” to set a story stumbling — say a murder, or an extreme dilemma showcased upfront — is not new, the institutionalisation of it is. Today, it is harder to sell a story that is not templated, a template arrived at by past successes and rigorous backend data — drop-off rates, drop-off points, completion rates, and so on.

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Data, like a double-edged sword, gives access to an audience’s behavioural pattern, but also turns every successful screenplay into a template, and every template into a cliche, till it arrives at the equilibrium of manageable mediocrity.

“Innovation always gets handicapped by data,” writer Hussain Dalal, who has worked on shows like Taaza Khabar and Farzi, offers. “Right now the platform feedback is given to me by a person who has never made a film — that person is giving feedback based on this data. We make shows not because of networks, but despite networks."

He offers the example of Farzi as a counterfactual. “It has no inciting incident in the first episode. Today, it is the most-watched Indian streaming series of all time.” The irony, as Dalal sees it, is the success that the studios are trying to create a template of was achieved without one, and sometimes by the active avoidance of it. Data keeps chasing success, and not the other way around.

“I don’t think, prior to streaming, we used to aim for a ‘cold open’ kind of storytelling. That’s a relatively recent phenomenon,” editor Antara Lahiri, who has worked on shows like Four More Shots Please and Bard of Blood, tells THR India.

Nowadays, she notes, even our movies have adopted this forced language of urgency at the outset, “realigning their narratives to fit the streaming template”. On the Streaming Show podcast, Lahiri recounted being told by an executive, “We want engagement points at 2 minutes, 7 minutes, 11 minutes, 17 minutes…something like that.” Though no one is sitting by her side with a stopwatch, these guidelines are working towards data-driven storytelling, turning art into a resolved formula, with an efficiency that often comes at the cost of emotional engagement, at the cost of formal experimentation, and more worryingly, at the cost of artistic intuition. 

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Today, working writers know what the platforms are looking for, and preemptively write to those demands. For example, the Hindi-to-English ratio of the dialogues must be 80:20; the show must begin with a hook; something explosive must happen around the third episode, where most people drop off. The question of why begin your show with a murder feels silly, because it is both question and answer. 

“There are a whole lot of algorithms that we need to follow as writers. It can be challenging, because sometimes you are not working for the story, but the algorithm. But it can also be an interesting challenge — to keep your integrity and tell a good story at the end of the day,” writer Nandini Gupta, who has worked on shows like Masaba Masaba and Mismatched, tells THR India. 

To be a storyteller in the realm of streaming, then, is to dance in chains. “Barring a few shows, I can’t remember the last time I did something distinctive in terms of the edit,” Lahiri notes. “The major feedback we are dealing with is to keep the pace of storytelling. Earlier, the setup would take three episodes. Nowadays, we hope to establish the conflict in the first episode itself.” To keep the storytelling dense, and the forward march rhythmic and quick, there are now multi-character narratives. “To keep the pace, you can now cut between the many characters,” Lahiri notes.  

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This efficiency is not just demanded from the storytelling but the story-making, too. “One platform literally told us — We don’t care about quality, just deliver the show on time,” Lahiri notes. The point of storytelling is, increasingly, to get it done. But this was not always the case. Or at least, it wasn’t to this extent.

As Dalal notes, in the early 2010s, the understanding was that “everything that is even better than cinema, even more edgy, even more powerful, is on the internet, on streaming”. What was supposed to be “Cinema Plus” has now become “Television Plus” — a shorthand used these days by streaming executives to express what kind of “content” they are looking for. 

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Gupta, who has been writing for shows from the early years of Indian streaming, notes, “It was like the wild wild west back then. We could do a lot of things, say a lot of things. We weren’t terribly worried. Now, you know there are things you can avoid — religion, for example — so the feedback and back-and-forth communication is reduced, and you can focus on the screenplay.”

Even the difference between the two seasons of Masaba Masaba she co-wrote was palpable. While the first season, in 2020, was a breeze, while writing the second season she was suddenly asked “Screenplay 101” questions by non-writers: What is the pay-off? What is the inciting incident? What is the character’s intention? “We were, like, there is an answer somewhere in the screenplay, but I am not consciously thinking about these things while writing.” The writer was now called to theorise their own work, by throwing it under the scanner of a checklist.

Over time, the anxiety about the “second screen” that the storytellers were competing with started expressing itself in the writing — “very crisp, very tight, no lolling or ambling; the dopamine has to be immediate and regular; every scene has to have something important”, Gupta notes.

Storytelling has been reduced to an act of resuscitation, and as filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee told THR India, with binge watching, “The algorithm is training the audience. You are not training the algorithm.”

At a basic storytelling level, too, the shows are failing, because the very idea of an “end” is being muddied. These days, shows do not end, they promise you another beginning, for another season, the narrative climactic catharsis replaced by a narrative tease, keeping the climax open-ended enough for the next season, and then another, until the show is cancelled. Rare is the show with the kind of closure of Scam 1992, the emotional crescendo of Jubilee or Rocket Boys, or the taut clarity of Paatal Lok.

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Dalal quickly replies, “We writers know how to end shows! It is the streaming executives who change our endings.” He gives an example of a show he worked on that was “a piece of our heart”. 10 episodes were written, and the network came back with feedback that they wanted two seasons, and to rewrite the show with the eighth episode as the finale, making episodes nine and ten the first two episodes of the second season. “The first season releases, and this network comes to us with data saying that people are not enjoying it, and so they are cancelling it. But people didn’t enjoy it because you did not let me end the story properly,” Dalal notes.

How does one get a show like Black Warrant, which, as writer Satyanshu Singh notes, “broke free of predictable patterns”, pushed through this feedback loop of hell? As Anurag Kashyap noted on Instagram, Black Warrant — which was first made, and then sold to Netflix — “is an example of how the best shows and films are acquired by the streaming platform and not created by them”. 

When Black Warrant released, Singh was told how, while watching the show, “it was difficult to find a pattern or plot line, as there is no central mystery pushing the story forward, and episodes were written to serve character and setting, not a succession of events”. It was as though the storytelling was training a new kind of spectatorship.

Between an editor’s cut, a director’s cut, a producer’s cut, and a platform’s cut, something essential to storytelling gets lost — the moment it is treated as a tamed, shapely thing, it loses the wild vitality that makes a story burn. When asked on the Streaming Show about the one thing he wants to change about the streaming landscape, writer Sumit Purohit of Scam 1992 fame responded, “Give me freedom. Don’t give me a formula.”