Rajeev Saxena
In the span of three-four years, in the competition of cinema and television, the web series has set a record of popularity by making its place on the OTT platform. Far away from the censor’s grip, mass-appealing cool content, colloquial language and local level dialogue-stimulating visuals have made a difference between the big and small screens on laptops, tablets and even mobile phones with small recharges and meager subscription charges. Streaming new movies and dozens of web series on all the OTT apps readily available in the U.S. has revolutionized and everyone is spending their leisure time with them. Apart from Mumbai, film and TV producers from South India and Bengal, as well as several new banners, found a new opportunity to capitalize on this completely new interest from the audience. During the complete lockdown of Corona, when studio and outdoor shooting of big films and TV serials were banned, many wave series were shot in small flats in bungalows and apartments. The use of stock shots of metropolitan and small towns and villages, as well as indoor shooting generally through drone cameras, made the creation of web series easy.
Like all artists, silver has turned. This is the reason why actors and actresses got caught in the magnetic attraction of web series without even paying attention to the content. The filming of a series of minimum six and maximum nine episodes has a time limit of about 60 to 90 days, so it was not difficult for the actors to do more than one series.
The big banners considered it appropriate to sign cinema’s eminent actors, in view of the OTT platform’s lavish budget, as the popularity of the series could only be a bias to produce its next season or sequel. Actors like Saif Ali Khan, Manoj Bajpayee, Emraan Hashmi, Arshad Warsi, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and actresses like Huma Qureshi, Hina Khan, Esha Gupta, Lara Dutta, Soha Ali Khan started increasing in demand, who have less budget than the big stars of cinema. became available in
Along with Pankaj Tripathi, Rajkumar Rao, Ronit Rai, Prateek Babbar, Manav Kaul, Kunal Kemmu, artists like Rajat Kapoor, Raghuveer Yadav, Rohit Rai, Chunky Pandey, Divya Dutta, Shilpa Shinde, Kavita Kaushik, Sunil Grover, Arif Zakaria are also on the web. Joined the main characters of the series. Here, a new army of many new actors of theater or TV serials also became popular among the audience in the meantime.
Through web series like Mizarpur, Panchayat, Whistle Blower, Rocket Boyz, no less known actors and actresses like Prateek Gandhi, Vikrant Massey, Darshan Kumar, Tridha Choudhary, Darshana Kanitkar also became a part of the popularity of OTT. Rajeev Khandelwal, who played the lead role in a few films like Table No 21, Aamir and TV shows like Sach Ka Saamna, has been seen in the most web series till date. Rohit Rai’s small screen identity also got him no less work on OTT.
Wave series, mostly crime based material, feature characters and roles of police officers in addition to the protagonists. All the actors like Ravi Kishan, Sachin Khedekar, Ronit Rai, Shakti Anand, Amit Behl looked perfect in the role of the police. Veteran actors associated with theater like Vinay Pathak, Ranvir Shorey, Vijay Raaz, Vineet Kumar, Anil Rastogi, Hussain, Kumud Mishra, Piyush Mishra, Sanjay Mishra, Govind Namdev, Mukesh Tiwari have left no stone unturned to bring character roles to life in wave series. left. Manoj Bajpayee achieved the title of OTT’s most popular hero through his performance in Family Men, while Pankaj Tripathi also showed his acting skills.
Understanding the pulse of the common audience, Huma Qureshi did a smart job by joining big films as well as some special web series. Playing the character of former Bihar Chief Minister in ‘Maharani’ was no less than a challenge for Huma, but she really proved herself to be a fine actress through this. At the same time, Sunil Grover has given the best performance so far in the web series ‘Sunflower’.
Soha Ali did not get special opportunities in films. In Zee Five’s series ‘Kaun Banegi Shikharvati’, he performed the comic character to the best in the presence of Naseeruddin Shah and Lara Dutta. The web series proved to be a life-giving Sanjeevani Booti for Babi Deol. His role in Prakash Jha’s series ‘Ashram’ proved him to be a good actor a little above average. In ‘Love Hostel’, Babi took another step forward to portray the character of a middle-aged man. For the time being, if for a while, these chains, surrounded by many allegations, have not only paid silver for the artists of the Hindi region, but have also provided a platform to the new producers.