In the ongoing streaming wars, Netflix has made a long-pending strategic move by taking the first step to create more original South Indian content. Even though the streaming giant had earlier made Tamil anthologies like Navarasa and Paava Kadhaigal, The Game becomes Netflix’s first original Tamil web series. It is set to premiere on their platform on October 2. Netflix launched its first original Indian web series in 2018 with Sacred Games, and seven years later, the focus is finally shifting towards the Tamil market. Monika Shergill, VP of content, Netflix India, points to how the seven-year gap was utilised to focus on films. “We wanted Netflix to be the home of Tamil cinema, and I believe we have become one. That is how you bring in the audience,” she says, before elaborating on why it took them years to enter the Tamil web series market. “Most of our writing ecosystem is aligned with film writing. Although we have been looking to develop Tamil web series for a long time, most of our Tamil directors and writers were only interested in writing for the film format. A series takes a longer time to develop. It is at least a three-year journey.”
When Netflix thought it was finally the right time to develop an original web series in Tamil, Applause Entertainment arrived with The Game, and Monica says that it had everything Netflix was looking for at the time. Sameer Nair, CEO of Applause Entertainment Ltd, says, “We were really drawn to the world of The Game. It is a cool story set around the world of video games, its huge fanbase, and developers.” The series revolves around Kavya (Shraddha Srinath), an eccentric up-and-coming game developer, and Sameer points to how The Game delves into the dark corners of the gaming field and its fandom. “The story revolves around a woman protagonist in a heavily male-dominated field, and it also shows the misogynistic side of the gaming industry. We often talk about how women face a lot of barriers, trying to break the glass ceiling, in almost every industry, and it is even more pronounced in the corporate world,” says Sameer, adding, “We chose to make it in Tamil because South India is the hub of development, and the gaming industry is thriving here. The series also explores themes related to that.”
When discussing their insights on the different markets, especially about the stark differences between the stories developed for the North and South Indian audiences, Monika says that the differences are mostly relegated to the setting and treatment, and never about the emotions. “I wouldn’t say there are core differences in North and South. Storytelling is universal. The style and the treatment might be different. South cinema’s style is distinct compared to Bollywood. Even in the South, Malayalam is different from Tamil and Telugu. While the emotions stay universal, the style has distinct differences,” says Monika, who also points out that the actual differences are between films and web series. “Series is a harder format to land. They’re dense and complex. The characters need to have longer arcs. In films, you get a shorter time, so some characters can stay two-dimensional. A series will never allow you to have two-dimensional characters. Even smaller characters need to have three-dimensional arcs to feed into the subtexts and layers in the story. The series format is new to India, and it is even newer to the South because we started early in Hindi. This is something that is just beginning, but it is an exciting beginning.”
As someone who is also currently involved in large-scale productions like Hansal Mehta’s Gandhi (the series recently had its premiere at TIFF) and Mari Selvaraj’s Bison: Kaalamaadan, Sameer adds another layer to the conversation around creating stories of wildly different scales. “There are no smaller or larger stories. Everything we make, smaller or larger, takes the same amount of time. That 18 to 36 months cycle is standard for whatever we’re doing. As for the variety of stories, I think we’ve been doing that for a long time.” If not the scale, then what excites Sameer is the simple mantra of 'follow the fun’. He concludes, “We, at Applause Entertainment, love working with a diverse set of creators. It adds to our creative pool, and it is a lot of fun working with writers and directors from different backgrounds. We worked with Vignesh Raja on Por Thozhil and now with Mari Selvaraj on Bison: Kaalamaadan, we are excited about that film, and I can’t wait for everyone to watch.”