Indian television series

Indian television series

This category includes TV series made and shown in India; it does not include series made outside India and imported.

Wherever possible, articles should not be placed directly into this category, but rather into the subcategories.

Stub articles in these categories should be tagged with {{India-tv-stub}}.

Indian soap operas or Indian serials are soap operas written, produced and filmed in India, with characters played by Indians and episodes broadcast on Indian television.

Unlike the season based production in most countries, most of Indian television fiction tends to be regular-broadcasting soap opera. These started in the late 1990s, as more and more people began to purchase television sets. At the beginning of the 21st century, soap operas became an integral part of Indian culture. Indian soap operas mostly concentrate and revolves around women and show the conflict between love and arranged marriages, family relations and the problems faced by women in India and many includes family melodrama. Indian soap operas have multilingual production.

Indian soap operas are also broadcast in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and West Africa.They are often mass-produced under large production banners, with companies like Balaji Telefilms running different language versions of the same serial on different television networks or channels.

The most common languages in which Indian serials are made are Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam.

History

The Indian soap operas are not only popular in India but also among st the Indian diaspora across the world of which several soap operas have gained cult followings in the UK, Canada, the United States, and some parts of Europe, South Africa, Australia, South Asia and several other countries. The majority of the television soap operas are produced for early evening or evening timeslots. Unlike the soap operas telecast across the globe, Indian soap operas are generally of 30 to 60 minutes (including commercials). Stylistically, these series most closely resemble UK soap operas in that they are nearly always shot on videotape, are mainly recorded in a studio and use a multi-camera setup. The original serials were shot entirely in-studio. During the 1990s occasional filmed inserts were used to incorporate sequences shot outdoors. Outdoor shooting later became commonplace and starting in the late 2000s, it became standard practice for some on-location footage to be featured in each episode to capitalise on the attractiveness and exotic nature of these locations for Indian as well as international audiences. Most Indian soap operas focus on a mixed age range of middle-class characters and regularly feature a range of locations where the various, disparate characters can meet and interact.