FAMILY THE STORYTELLER: FROM MELODRAMAS ON TV TO HIGH-OCTANE STREAMING CONTENT, SAMEER NAIR HAS A KNACK FOR UNDERSTANDING CONSUMER PULSE.

MEDIA AND entertainment industry veteran Sameer Nair literally lives, breathes, and sleeps content. While his day job as MD of Applause Entertainment entails creating highly engaging content for streaming platforms, Nair also unwinds with shows. He is currently binge-watching multiple shows—Pierce Brosnan starrer MobLand, and Landman, set in the oilfields of Texas. It is inevitable for a professional storyteller to think shop even while he is consuming content to entertain himself. “My team gets both recommendations as well as instructions,” he laughs.

- BY AJITA SHASHIDHAR

The person who exposed Indian audiences to international reality formats such as Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) on Star Plus in the '90s and also got the nation hooked on to the saas-bahu sagas holds himself responsible for homogenising television. “When we had incredible success with the saas-bahu shows, everyone followed suit. Indian television has remained the same for the past 25 years,” he says.

Nair, however, has evolved. Family melodramas don’t appeal to him anymore. The Indian audience has also changed over the years, he says. The game today is all about creating high-octane streaming content for the 50 to 100-odd million consumers who no longer relate to Nagin on Colors but also don’t understand Narcos (Star World and Colors Infinity) either. Ever since he set up Applause Entertainment in its current avatar under the Aditya Birla Group’s umbrella in August 2018, Nair has produced 60 highly acclaimed streaming shows such as Criminal Justice, Black Warrant, Scam, and The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case, among others. “It is not westernised, anglicised foreign programming. It is Indian programming… premium storytelling.” Each episode of a Criminal Justice or Scam would have cost nothing less than ₹3-4 crore. But that was the investment required to give the audience disruptive, audacious content, says Nair.

Premium storytelling doesn’t mean telling stories to a premium audience. The game is all about democratising premium content. Nair has recently collaborated with globally bestselling author Jeffrey Archer. Applause has secured the adaptation rights to six of Archer's most celebrated works: