Taking off from where it had paused, Season 2 of ‘The Broken News’ gives us more of the same: rival TV channels ‘Awaaz Bharti’ and ‘Josh 24/7’ locked in cut-throat competition to fetch in ‘breaking news’, people scurrying about clutching notebooks — everyone has something to hold in their hands, whether in meetings or striding across the newsfloor — and shady proprietors engaged in backroom dealings with shadier politicians.
At its most effective, the first season did give us a glimpse of TV newsrooms as potent battlegrounds for the minds and hearts of the viewers, reflecting the larger war raging outside. ‘Awaaz Bharti’, helmed by the old-school high-on-ethics journalist Amina Qureshi (Sonali Bendre), was on the side of the angels, as much as any news organisation could be; ‘Josh 24/7’, run by the brash Dipankar Sanyal (Jaideep Ahlawat) was very clear about its priorities, first him, then his owners and their crooked commands, and then everything else, which included an unhappy spouse.
These two actors are still the strongest reason to watch Season 2, along with their faithful lieutenants — Shriya Pilgaonkar as Radha Bhargava, the jailed reporter who gets hardened even as her incarceration exceeds her patience; Faisal Rashid as Kamal Wadia, her partner and colleague who holds on to his beliefs even when offered an easy choice; Indraneil Sengupta as the supportive man who has Qureshi’s back, Taruk Raina and Sanjeeta Bhattacharya as reporters-on-the-job, along with two new additions, Akshay Oberoi as the US-returned moneybags who looks too good to be true, and Geetika Vidya Ohlan as the reporter who learns, double-quick, how to survive and thrive.
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As in the previous season, the show is the strongest when it takes us close to the behind-the-scenes goings-on in media companies, and in the scenes where the actual news is broken. Like last time, Ahlawat remains the kingpin, this time revealing a surprisingly vulnerable side to him, and showing us a flash of real reporting when he does a piece-to-camera from the ground. Bendre is good too, except you wish she wouldn’t have been made to give multiple lectures on the real-job-of-journalism — no one has the time for this, everyone is expected to hit the ground running and keep running. Pilgaonkar’s bent-on-revenge persona is not as interesting as the writers think it is; Radha Bhargava spends too much time spewing venom against the ‘chief minister’ who has wronged her, and not enough on getting on with it.
And the other thing which sticks in your craw, something a real newsperson would be the first to point out: a 24-hour TV news cycle doesn’t survive only on sensational ‘exposes’, even in these polarised times where heated personal attacks pass off for ‘discussions’, and not all reporters go about cultivating secret sources, and cracking complicated cases. There’s a lot of bread-and-butter stories which a half-hour bulletin has to include, and we see no sign of them in a show whose entire focus is on news TV. Yes, that’s not giving the viewers thrills and chills (in one segment, there’s a bomb-blast in which journalists go sleuthing; in another, a character is slipped a lethal poison while investigating potential murders), but that would be more like it.
Still, the show does well enough in the parts where it borrows bravely from current events, and tells us how all ‘news’ can be ‘spun’ so that a particular point-of-view is cemented, so yes, I’m quite looking forward to season 3.
The Broken News 2 cast: Jaideep Ahlawat, Sonali Bendre, Shriya Pilgaonkar, Indraneil Sengupta, Fasial Rashid, Taaruk Raina, Sanjeeta Bhattacharya, Akshay Oberoi, Geetika Vidya Ohlan
The Broken News 2 director: Vinay Waikul
The Broken News 2 rating: 2.5 stars
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