The Broken News Season 2 Is A Bollywood-ised Take On Issues That Deserve Better

This column was originally published as part of our newsletter The Daily Show on May 8, 2024. Subscribe here. (We're awesome about not spamming your inbox!)

***

IN A SCENE from The Broken News Season 2 (ZEE5), a teenage daughter asks her father — a celebrity news anchor with a national(ist) TV channel, known for his hectoring ways — what the “truth” is about a sensational reports surrounding a social media influencer’s death. The news anchor, Dipankar Sanyal (played by Jaideep Ahlawat), is dumbfounded by this question. “What do you mean by truth?” he asks. The daughter says, “I don’t know. Josh [Sanyal’s news channel] keeps saying weird things about her. Is any of it even true?” Sanyal looks back at her guiltily, and says, “I don’t know, beta,” fully aware that his news channel has never really been in the pursuit of “truth”. And then she throws a curveball at him, one that changes his perspective about his profession: “You’re the editor-in-chief. Find out what really happened to her. Isn’t that your job?”

There’s another scene in the series that makes you hit the pause button, and think. Sanyal is telling his young associate Anuj (Taaruk Raina), an anecdote from a couple of decades ago when he was a reporter covering the Bihar elections. A local goon had put a gun to his forehead to threaten him against exposing too much. Sanyal tells Anuj that he had no idea from where he mustered up the courage to pull the gun to his face and say, “Journalist hoon saaley, dum hai toh maar goli [I’m a journalist you asshole, if you have the guts, shoot me].” This is a character who has made a career out of polarising TV news debates and unethical journalism. A character undergoing his own philosophical and ideological metamorphosis. A character who is using his own courage — that he lost along the way — to inspire a young colleague to chase a difficult story. It doesn’t get meatier than this.

Unfortunately, that statement can be applied to the series in its entirety as well. It really doesn’t get meatier than this. The Broken News is about two warring news channels with opposing ideologies, and how the editors of both manoeuvre through political turmoil without compromising on their journalistic ethics. Herein lies the question that Season 2 wants to answer: Is there a place for journalistic ethics in today’s media landscape? How The Broken News Season 2 attempts to visually play this out, however, is confusing, with too many subplots, and cluttered writing that is a disservice to the performances by Jaideep Ahlawat, Sonali Bendre and Shriya Pilgaonkar.

The Broken News Season 2 is more melodramatic than a Bollywood movie but with issues that would warrant a serious news magazine’s cover. The mismatch is glaring. Or as the MBA dude-bros would say, there’s no product-market fit. This isn’t a show aspiring to become The Newsroom, and so the writers’ and makers’ half-baked attempts at portraying the glory and legacy of honest journalism is perplexing. Why wouldn’t they commit to one tone or one vision? The writing is scattered, unable to focus on one buildable story. Instead, through the eight episodes, we run around in multiple narrative circles, only to come up with a climax that looks like it was written by AI.

Allow me to list down the various “causes” and themes based on real-life references that the show uses:

• Award wapsi
• Journalists being imprisoned for speaking “the truth”, aka uncomfortable facts that ruffle political feathers
• Naxalism
• “Urban naxals”
• Surveillance, data theft and corporate espionage
• Fake social media influencers and followers
• Toxic quality of local water and no action from local government bodies
• Faux citizen journalism fanned by unverified handles on social media
• Bollywood “mafia” and nepo kids
• Sensationalist news being used as a distraction from seemingly “real” issues
• Drugs and Bollywood
• Deepfakes
• Cartoonists getting beaten up for drawing the truth
• Ruling party’s IT cell and their antics
• Mid-day meal scam
• House of Burari reference
• Maharashtra’s farmer suicides and caste politics

And none of these are even the main cause or driving factor of The Broken News. This is just a list of the subplots.

I’m aching for the day when producers realise that just because you have room for eight episodes doesn’t mean you stuff the narrative with every single thought that crosses the writer’s mind. There’s a certain art to using screen time to your story’s advantage. Less is more, not only in the tonality of the writing but also in the cause you want to champion. This is especially true at a time when content fatigue is a hard-hitting reality. With so many resources, access to top of the line talent, and audience attention at their disposal, if streaming executives are choosing “melodrama” as the dominant tone in their TV series, that’s not only sad, but also disconnected from what viewers are looking for. If melodrama is what they wanted, all they have to do is switch on a real news channel.

Stream The Broken News Seasons 1 & 2 here. 

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of OTTplay. The author is solely responsible for any claims arising out of the content of this column.