Tabbar director on knocking on the doors of OTT giants before his series got picked up
Tabbar
Meddling with tried-and-tested methods to hold viewers’ attention can be a gamble, but it certainly paid off for Tabbar director Ajitpal Singh. Despite being well aware that OTT viewers can switch between series as easily as they can flip a coin, Singh decided to toy with their patience instead of focusing on gripping attention from the word go. “[OTT makers] fear that if they don’t provide a lot of information [at the onset], the audience won’t understand what’s going on. We took the other route and played with the material to evoke curiosity. We were afraid that the audience wouldn’t have the patience to watch the show [till it gathered pace], but its success shows that we don’t give our audience enough credit. We wanted to make a show that’s realistic; not one that was like a fantasy,” says Singh.
Ajitpal Singh
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Singh credits his superlative cast members Pavan Malhotra and Supriya Pathak for elevating the material. But, the journey to success was ridden with hardships. “Only Sony Liv had faith in me. I was an indie maker with a script. We went to small, medium, and large platforms. Some of them didn’t even read our pitch. There was no response, and we kept following up. There were excruciating periods of lull; some of them stretched to three months. Sony believed that an independent filmmaker can bring a fresh gaze to a story of this nature. It’s hard to keep faith in your material after rejections. [Some platforms] rejected us, and the next day we would see something really bad launching on their platforms. It made us wonder if our material was worse than that. I suppose, platforms have their own parameters. Everything is a cold algorithm now.” He says a second season is in the works.
Also Read: Supriya Pathak: Audiences brought change
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