Filmmaker duo Pushkar-Gayathri’s Tamil web series Suzhal: The Vortex was released recently on Prime Video. The problem with this small-town crime thriller is that all its ideas, characterisation, plot points and drama seem like the bullet points on a series pitch PPT. They are not fleshed out enough to make for an engaging series. Yet, I found myself binge-watching the show to witness how it unravels. This made me wonder about the very nature of how web series are constructed and designed for consumption.
Suzhal: The Vortex has good actors, but it never really extracts great performances from them. It is set in an interesting mountain terrain, but it hardly exploits the location to add drama to its narrative. The nine-day-long Mayana Kollai, the local temple festival, offers interesting visual imagery, but its use as a metaphor gets numbingly repetitive and tiring after a point. Several dramatic points get continuously thrown at us but the characters behave the same way as before and after, as if they have absolutely no stake in the story.
Despite all this mediocrity, the series kept me curious and hooked for its entire running time. Even when I was sure that it was lacking heavily in several departments, I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to know what happened next. After a few episodes, to escape the tediousness of the narrative, I decided to run the series at 2X or 3X speed just to find out who has done it in this whodunit.
While the western audience might already be very familiar with the web series format, it is new for the average Indian audience. Unlike feature films that attempt to tell a story within 90-150 minutes, each season of a web series is forced to keep you engaged for 8-10 episodes that cumulatively last for 6-8 hours or even more. And OTT platforms are clear that they want their audience to binge-watch, for they fear that the viewer who logs out after an episode or two might not return to the series again. So the only way to make sure the viewer watches an entire season is to make it binge-worthy.
This is unlike how series were consumed a decade or so earlier on television. Most series then released one episode per week. The episodes would leave you at a cliffhanger moment but only to make sure you return to watch the next week as well. This weekly viewing format didn’t allow for binge-watching unless the whole of an already finished series was made available online. Binge-watching was usually the resort of those who were in some form of pain. When they were grieving the loss of a loved one or nursing a broken heart or when they had to insulate themselves from any other devastating event, binge-watching served as a potent distraction. But today, binge-watching has become the norm.
However, an average viewer can’t watch anything for eight hours without feeling very fatigued. The job of a web series then becomes about fighting this mental and physical fatigue of the audience and keeping them hooked rather than fully engaged. So it is not surprising that in 2017, Netflix chairman and CEO Reed Hastings declared that the streamer’s biggest competitor was, in fact, sleep. “You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep,” Hastings said. “And we’re winning.”
This is what Suzhal: The Vortex succeeds in. Even though you are never truly engaged with its narrative, it compensates for that by adding several twists and turns to keep you curious. By deliberately misleading you and changing the narrative goal post, it keeps you hooked, even if some of these come across as contrived.
This seems to be the very nature of how web series are formulated today. A disproportionate amount of effort is put into keeping the viewer hooked, rather than being invested in good storytelling. As a result, even when viewers feel cheated and exhausted, they keep craving for more. It’s almost as if watching a series is an unhealthy addiction that can only offer a momentary high and not a fulfilling experience.
This is in contrast to how the feature film format is able to make the audience feel, think or even reflect on various issues, apart from entertaining them. Feature films have, of course, had a much longer history and have taken plenty of time to evolve to their current form. And it is quite possible that web series, too, might break away from their current addictive techniques and move on to better storytelling methods. Until then, however, watching a series will resemble a heavy drinking session that can be fun while it lasts but is sure to give a bad hangover the next morning.
The writer is a Chennai-based filmmaker
