From soap operas to blockbusters: Inside Sameer Nair’s masterclass in understanding the Indian audience

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. 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: The Clifton Chronicles series, The Fourth Estate, First Among Equals, The Eleventh Commandment, Sons of Fortune, and Heads You Win. Applause will develop and produce these into a mix of high-quality films and series. “We will be language-agnostic. We can even produce one of these as a film in Telugu or Tamil,” says Nair. This Nagin-Narcos rationale struck a chord with Aditya Birla Group chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla. Nair met Birla at a social do in 2017 and the two got chatting. “As we talked about how the Indian audience had evolved and was looking for more mature, premium content, he wanted to know more... I met him again a few months later and told him that I wanted to set up a studio.” Birla had a studio called Applause Entertainment that had produced Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black (2005). “That studio was lying dormant and Mr Birla asked me to revive it. This is Applause Entertainment 2.0.” Apart from fiction series, Applause has also produced documentaries such as Modern Masters: S.S. Rajamouli. It has also launched ApplaToon, an animation channel on YouTube. It has also built franchises: Criminal Justice is in the fourth season; Scam is a two-season franchise; and City of Dreams is in the third season. It had been Nair’s dream to set up a film studio since the ’90s, inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. In fact, he and Birla had met and discussed it even back then. When Nair discussed his idea again in 2017, he was clear he needed financial support from a deep-pocketed conglomerate. “Anyone can set up a studio, but I had realised the importance of having good-quality capital to sustain the business. The reason Korean content has become so big is because it got support from the government and industry. Even Indian content creators need support from the government and large businesses; only then can we become a $100-billion content industry.” Serious business Nair and Birla were clear that Applause would stay away from film-making and focus on streaming. This was also the time when the film studio model had started to crumble. Television, despite its mammoth reach of 600 million homes, was also losing steam. All eyes were on streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hotstar (now JioHotstar), and these were in dire need of original content. “Netflix in the U.S. was not just making original content. It was also buying content from NBC and ABC, Fox and CBS. When the streamers came to India, there was nothing to buy... We saw a clear opportunity to make that premium content and give it to them.” Both were clear that producing content at Applause had to be serious business. “Mr Birla wanted Applause to be run as a corporate. I even asked him what kind of office he wanted to set up. I told him I can set up the classic film office in a bungalow in Juhu or I can do glass and steel in BKC (Bandra-Kurla Complex). He preferred the latter.” A glass and steel office also required a sound business model. Nair gave wings to his vision by setting up a hub-and-spoke model. “With Applause at the centre, we have creative, we have finance, we do the marketing, and we do the distribution. We work with a whole bunch of creative partners… [they] could be people who have written books, it could be a format that we have bought internationally, or those who have original stories.” While Criminal Justice is an adaptation of a BBC show, Scam is based on a book by Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu. And City of Dreams is an original story. “We work with a different director and production house to execute it… we have worked with BBC, Banijay, and also with the likes of Nikhil Advani, Vikramaditya Motwane, and Nagesh Kukunoor.” Nair likes to compare his business with Apple. “Like Apple is designed in California and manufactured everywhere, Applause is the creative core, and we work with everyone.” Working with varied stakeholders brings in diversity of thought. “We have been audacious in what we chose to do — the licensing of content… We have been disruptive because we did shows such as Scam (which is on India’s biggest financial scam) and we did Rudra: The Edge of Darkness and Black Warrant, and we are doing Gandhi. We are trying to make content that can dazzle, disturb, and delight you as well as it disrupts you.” Running a content studio like a corporate also means keeping a close watch on costs — the biggest reason for Indian studios going bust was their dependence on expensive star talent and unrealistic budgets. One also can’t ignore that India doesn’t have as many theatres where films can be screened. For a population of 1.4 billion, India has only 9,000 screens (and this is depleting by the day with single-screen theatres shutting down) as opposed to China that has 70,000. Almost 80% of the budget for most films goes to the celebrity star cast. While the not-so-viable film economics was the reason for Applause betting on streaming, Nair says the studio has ensured that it asks tough questions before embarking on any project. “Why should we do this now? For whom are we doing this, at what scale should we do this? Is this the right time? — these are hygiene questions.” The Indian content industry is often accused of promoting nepotism. Apart from Deepak Segal, a former colleague at Star TV who is chief creative officer at Applause, Nair has consciously hired people he was never worked with before. Dare to risk Applause’s clear differentiator is its licensing model. It creates the content end-to-end and licenses it to platforms. This in a market where commissioned content is the norm. Nair quotes a dialogue from Scam: “‘Thoda to daring karna padega darling! (You have to take risks)’.” Though making the content and licensing it runs the risk of the studio sitting on unsold inventory, the pros outweigh the cons. It gives a studio the ability to capitalise on the IP. Globally, IP ownership is critical. Even within India, one of the key reasons film-maker Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions managed a `1,000-crore investment from Adar Poonawalla is because it owns over 80% of the IP of its content. IP ownership not just helps in building long-term franchises of stories and characters; it also gives the studio leverage to distribute its content in various markets. Applause has just scratched the surface of the licensing game. As streaming becomes mainstream at Applause, Nair is looking at greenlighting films. That’s the logical evolution, he says. Applause has already soaked its feet into making smaller budget films such as Sharmajee Ki Beti and Do Aur Do Pyaar and the plan now is to make big-budget films. Nair has signed two films with director Kabir Khan, and one film with Imtiaz Ali. He also hints at a possible global co-production. Nair comes back to the topic of industry and government getting together to democratise entertainment consumption. “No platform will ever give a film revenues of ₹500 crore. Theatres can. The problem is we have made theatres inaccessible to the masses.” He urges the government and corporates to join hands to increase the penetration of theatres and make entertainment affordable. As he gets ready to build the House of Applause, Nair is exploring the world of content creation using AI. “AI is the biggest disruptor in our business… AI is changing the way content is being created… It is going to completely overhaul our business.” The journey of reinvention continues. Fortune India is now on WhatsApp! Get the latest updates from the world of business and economy delivered straight to your phone. Subscribe now.

From soap operas to blockbusters: Inside Sameer Nair’s masterclass in understanding the Indian audience

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