The growing pains of south Indian web series
Vilangu, a police procedural set in a village near Trichy with its narrative marred by caste, culture and politics, is one of the better web series to come out of south India. In an interview to YouTube channel Galatta Plus last year, its writer-director, Prasanth Pandiyaraj, elaborated on the challenges facing long-form series creators in the south. He mentioned “Mumbai" at least three times.
He spoke about how he must convey his pitch and story to the local team of an OTT platform, then impress the head, after which the they take it to Mumbai for a final call. There could be many challenges in the intervening stages, like his inability to articulate his ideas in English or adopt an exacting approach to express a local cultural setting. He spoke about how much gets lost in this process and the underlying difficulties in conveying even an idea for a web series.
The web series landscape on OTT platforms—long-form storytelling that is not mainstream soap operas—is still at a nascent stage in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. In Hindi, or Mumbai to use Prasanth’s nomenclature, it has burgeoned to now boast its own awards categories. It has also become cross-cultural: Amazon Prime’s Poacher (2024) has at least half the characters speaking in Malayalam, and The Family Man and Farzi have south stars Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Vijay Sethupathi, respectively.
Hindi streaming is now its own ecosystem that shares top talent with Hindi cinema, creating avenues for lesser-known actors and writers. The pandemic aided its growth, and the stagnation of Hindi cinema pushed bolder stories towards streaming. But this growth has not trickled down to south India, whose filmic styles and big names have been co-opted by Bollywood—from Atlee
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