How Real Is The Reality On Indian Reality Television? 

The scene is set. Shalini Passi, socialite, Delhite, art collector, artist, and piece of art herself is in Mauritius with her friends, sorry “friends” — the Bollywood wives and two other Delhi socialites. They are on forced vacation, shooting their reality television show Fabulous Lives Vs Bollywood Wives. In the midst of a drizzle, in full makeup and gown, Passi runs towards the ocean as though in slow-motion, straw hat in her hand, heaving as though collapsing into the arms of a lover. Before wading into the ocean, she flings her hat. She shimmies around in the water with movements she has learned from cinema, but, when replicated, become satire. Her face never goes under water, god forbid all that makeup, and that hair be ruined. In the corner of the frame, Neelam Kothari and Bhavana Pandey, on their morning walk — under umbrellas, in pajamas — are horrified, hiding behind a coconut tree. They react with chuckling disbelief.

What does it take to mine a moment like this, one of reality TV gold?

“That is not something we told Shalini to do,” Naomi Datta, creative producer of The Fabulous Lives Of Bollywood Wives, clarifies.

“See, it was raining, and when it rains, shooting options are limited. All of us were getting bored, but we were obviously on a strict timeline. This was an international shoot, after all. Shalini wanted to do something — she is very innocently restless. I happened to be with her. I literally asked Shalini, ‘Kya karein?’ (What to do?) and she just walked into the sea,” executive producer Manu Maharshi notes in a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India.

“Poor Neelam and Bhavana were actually on a walk, because you will notice they do not have any make-up on. The director tells them, ‘Guys, see what is happening. React to this!’ Those are the rewards of reality television,” Datta says.

This scene is quickly followed by a video diary of Pandey, sitting on a plush chair, decked up, talking about that moment as though it has just occured. This diary would have been shot a day or two after the ‘event’ they are speaking of, reacting to. Cut seamlessly, acted stiltedly, it gives the impression of life narrativized, which is distinct from a life lived, a distinction that the genre “reality television” keeps trying to blur, even as it constantly keeps them apart.

Datta, Maharshi and Aneesha Baig — also an executive producer on Fabulous Lives VS Bollywood Wives — insist that none of what they have made is scripted. Baig’s guiding principle is always — never put words in people’s mouths, thoughts in people’s heads.

What they have made is done with the guardrails of the camera — and not much of a leap to say, for the camera. Keep in mind, there are six-seven cameras on set every time the women are all together, one camera per woman. At some point, the camera does not capture but produces reality. As Baig notes, “If you point the camera long enough at people, things happen!”

With a show like Fabulous Lives VS Bollywood Wives — where hours are spent setting up frames, with perfect lighting so it “looks rich”, as Datta notes — you have to be clear how much of the show you are willing to plot loosely beforehand.  The crew meet with all the women first, individually, to discuss what has happened in their life in the interim, and their interpersonal dynamics. “We are like their therapists. The more honest and real you are, the better it is for you. Reality television is not about putting the best version of yourself out there. That is boring,” Datta notes. This is also where trust is built between the team and the character — that they will get the juiciest bits of their life, but never throw them under the bus.

They also have an honest conversation about where they want to be at the end of the season. The arc of every character on the show has to be defined. “No one should be a spectator. The end goal can’t be too concrete, because then it will be scripted — and we don’t script. Because to script you need these people to be actors, and barring Neelam Kothari, who was an actress, they cannot act to save their lives,” Datta says.

“You identify what each of them is keen to move the needle on and you run with it, explore that idea,” Maharshi tells The Hollywood Reporter India. For example, while speaking with Maheep Kapoor, the big revelation for the team was the rift with Seema Sajdeh, who was her best friend for two seasons. Immediately, the team knew that would be a track that would be addressed in front of the camera, they told Kapoor this, and she complied. In Sunder Nursery, when Kothari and Kapoor are sitting, sipping coffee, Maharshi prods them that it might be a good idea to talk about the Maheep-Seema schism since it has been playing on everyone’s minds. “But what they would say and how far the conversation would go, we do not know,” Baig clarifies the limits of these guardrails.

Elsewhere, the crew pick up on the dynamics and start “planting Shalini Passi” amidst the Bollywood Wives because they knew something would naturally come out of it. Even the Shobha De Instagram post taking a piss out of the Bollywood Wives, which the two Delhi women — Kalyani Saha Chawla and Shalini Passi — liked and commented on, was something that the Bollywood Wives “just happened” to see during their Karva Chaut shoot. Datta recollects, “We saw the girls whispering and they asked us if we had seen the post. And we were thinking, ‘Oh wow, let us make it part of the show!’ I saw comments saying we made Shobha De post it and got Kalyani and Shalini to comment on it. I wish we could think of these things.”

Besides, there is always going to be a holiday, not just because that is a trope in the show, but also because it throws everyone outside their comfort zones — and it is here that they got the money shot of Passi running into the water, forgetting that this was a reality show, and not her debut film.

Since the crew were only shooting for two-three months, and not following the women for an extended period of time, they needed these loose arcs as guiding lights — for each character, for each episode, for the season, with episode breakdowns and event flows — before shooting began, some semblance of structure. This is also why they have events — like the opening ball of the season. “Now, what happens in the ball is we let it flow — do these girls get along, or are they awkward? Or do they think it’s a big mistake? Whatever their natural reactions are, we let them be,” Datta clarifies. What is planned ahead are the brand tie-ups — the conversation between the Delhi women in a Manish Malhotra boutique, and the Rimple and Harpreet Narula photoshoot at the end, for example.

The cast of The Tribe looking up at the Lakmé billboard they featured in, in LA.

These can feel synthetic, false and cast an accusatory shadow on the whole show — like The Tribe following Indian influencers who are carted to LA, which spends a whole season to get to a point where the influencers are on a Lakmé billboard in the heart of LA, which looks like something pre-decided anyway, with all the Lakmé brand placements and collaboration conversation peppering the show. Though as executive producer on the show, Baig begs to differ. Maybe they were just bad actors?

It is not that reality television is not real, it is that reality television has changed the very meaning of real — an adjective twisting a noun till it becomes unrecognizable, even to itself. The question is not how real reality television is, but what the reality that reality television produces is. 

Uorfi Javed in her docu-series Follow Kar Lo Yaar.

Meghana Badola, executive producer of the Uorfi Javed docu-series Follow Kar Lo Yaar, keeps correcting me, “It is not a documentary! It is a ‘reality follow’.” Terminology swirls till meaning itself is rendered hollow.

Unlike the Fabulous Lives VS Bollywood Wives though, controversial influencer Uorfi Javed gave the team full access — with or without makeup, seated slumped or ramrod, inside her therapy session, inside a meltdown, inside her botox appointment, the needle secreting muscle-freezing toxins under her skin. She did not even see the final cut till the show dropped on Amazon Prime Video.

“We would stay with her for 11-12 hours a day, for over a month, we would go to her meetings, her shoots, in Lucknow. We were part of her life, we literally went with her everywhere,” Datta, also creative director of Follow Kar Lo Yaar notes. It was a more involved process.

In that sense, Javed is a perfect candidate. She walks into scenes lobbing grenades at people. She enters her brunch with an announcement of her intention to get breast implants. (She told the team beforehand she would do this.) She needles fights. (She did not tell the team beforehand she would do this.) Her ease in front of the camera is not just her presence, but her intuitions about what the camera wants to see. She becomes that. “Almost as a reality show subject who’s also directing the proceedings,” critic Suchin Mehrotra writes. “If you meet Uorfi, though, she is like that in real life. Suddenly, she will throw something in a conversation that throws you,” Badola responds.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter India, Javed notes, “I think Fabulous Lives and The Tribe are not really reality television shows. They are entertaining, but they are not hardcore reality shows.” By ‘hardcore’ she means one driven by total access, “I only have a problem letting people inside my vagina. Other than that, take whatever.”

Part of the show is then capturing what is strewn in front of them — for example, they rigged Javed’s car with cameras throughout the shoot, while the team can hear what is going on in the car, sitting elsewhere — and part of the show is making sure the camera is there to capture what they think is important, what they confect as important. So, for example, going to Lucknow for Eid, to spend time with her mother and extended family, was non-negotiable — they built their shooting schedule of over a month around it.

There are also ways the team muscles Javed, who speaks in clipped responses, into opening up. One was to send her to therapy — something she had never done before and barely since — and record those sessions. Badola also notes that if she felt that one of Javed’s meetings had not gone well and she wanted to make her talk, she makes Javed meet a friend, so the team then gets an excuse to make them speak and to make Javed react.

Before beginning their shoot, the team spent over a year with Javed and her sisters, her family, jotting down their dreams, aspirations, material conditions, their schedule, what triggers them, what are their interpersonal dynamics, etc. “From this we build a very loose structure, with a beginning, middle, end. We knew we wanted to end with the Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla shoot — when it was shot did not matter, but we knew in the timeline of the show, here was where the show would end. The post of these shows is critical, that is where the story gets made,” Badola notes.

In the early months of their conversation when Javed told them about her desire to get a boob job, they told her to hold off, and break the news to her friends and family when they started shooting. Javed complied. “Since they cannot shoot you for one year, they try to shoot your one year in one month,” Javed notes.

There is something fragile about Follow Kar Lo Yaar. On the one hand, Javed wants to create the forceful illusion of eternal youth with botox, fillers and a boob job. On the other hand, she is indifferent to the presence of the camera in her house, seated without make-up, often puffy-faced. Javed makes a distinction that is both horrifying and sincere, “I wanted to be real for the reality show, not for the world. If I am sitting around at home, I am not going to apply make-up. But I am getting botox and fillers because that is what I want my face to look like.”

In some sense the genre of reality television, too, wants to walk along that fragile coastline — between truth performed and truth embodied. When I ask Javed about the presence of the camera affecting how she sees herself, and therefore how she performs herself, she dryly dismisses the question, “It is not the presence, but the camera’s absence that affects me. Every time something gets messed up, I am thinking, shit, why are the cameras not here? The camera’s absence makes me ask myself: What am I even doing with my life?”