Adaptations and Global TV (Alternate title: Why can’t Netflix adapt things well?)
I have long been a fan of the French. Beyond my fondness for cheese and delicate desserts, I am a fan, specifically, of a lot of the acting talent that emerges from that country. This is, upon reflection, one of the key reasons I was drawn to and continued watching Call My Agent! While the show was fun it was hardly anything to FaceTime home about. Until, that is, I saw the same title litter my Netflix homepage, but this time with a ‘Bollywood’ slapped in front of it. The product, however, does the bare minimum to acknowledge the titular ‘Bollywood’ - its form functions as a copy & paste skeleton of the original French show, with Indian stars transplanted into script.
There is much to be said of Netflix’s need for expanding their IP, with glocalization a seemingly easy route to achieve that. Much to my dismay, though, the final product reads as unoriginal, stiff and most often corny. With material that seems to beautifully lend itself to the inner workings of Bollywood and Mumbai, the show seems glaringly out of touch and over the top. A begrudgingly less worse adaption is the Indian version of The Office, available there on Hotstar (Starz). While equally corny, the show leans into their Indian-ness and effectively glocalizes a show a large chunk of the audience is incredibly familiar with.
There is no larger objective in comparing the two but to foreground the discussion of adaptation. While there are some great examples of success stories, it’s hard to understand why there is a need to lean into this. Perhaps this is a means of cutting costs, working with existing scripts and simply plugging and playing a new cast into place. The final result of such work, though, is shoddy and embarrassing. With reviews online disparaging at best, it’s a shame to see the potential of such stellar material go to waste. Why are we shying away from original content, Netflix? Or, if adapting, why not use original material as inspiration and then create from there? There are glaringly obvious solutions to this problem, but unfortunately it seems like there are far more Call My Agent - Bollywood’s to be made before we get to those.
Everything Netflix does these days just seems lazy to me. It's the "oh, [x] works here, therefore [x] will work there" logic, which strips context out of the equation, that annoys me particularly. I know little about contemporary television, but when Italy (which I'll discuss in my presentation) "imported" foreign texts in the midcentury, they engaged also in a complex process of selection and localization. I'd be very interested in discussing the repercussions of doing so in class!
ReplyDeleteHow interesting, I recently finished binge watching the Spanish show Elite and was soon shown previews for the Bollywood adaptation, which is called Cla$$! I was really curious and since I'd gotten hooked on watching the cast of Elite have threesomes every night I considered watching to continue getting my fix. I haven't though, and while the addiction has waned, I am curious which elements it has retained. Is it really just a template transplanted copy of Elite with Bollywood actors? Or is it loosely inspired and tonally very different? Does it have the same threesomes and drugs? Does it do that thing I love literally every episode where any time somebody is having sex with someone they absolutely should not be having sex with, the one person who absolutely should not SEE them having sex together appears in a perfectly cracked doorway or perfectly positioned window?
ReplyDelete