There was a time when we could sit in front of the television and watch a story through the beginning, middle and end, all within in an hour. Shows like Katha Saagar and Darpan gave us a new story, characters and even a different moral every day. Watch any show on television today and you go through three dialogues and a bucket of tears in every episode. At the end of it, you are left confused. So unless you religiously spend a few hours in front of the television daily, most of the shows are quite useless.

American and British television seems to have taken care of this dilemma of the not-so-regular television viewer by the umpteen numbers of shows that don’t require you to block time in your diary every day in order to know how Anandi of Balika Vadhu reacted when she found out that her parents lost their house. The answer was the entry of the mini-series. Rome, Band of Brothers, Generation Kill and Carnival are just a few American mini-series that gained so much popularity.

Indian television was not far behind and tried to get the concept of short stories back with shows like Yule Love Stories, Star Bestsellers, Specials @10. In fact, these shows got on board famous directors like Madhur Bhandarkar, Anuraj Kashyap, Vikram Bhatt and Mahesh Manjrekar, but still managed to create no buzz. The American shows on the other hand are still repeated on television and are regular requests on the download circuits too.

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