The temperature’s going up

Although they started life as a YouTube channel creating funny spoof videos like ‘Gangs of Social Media’
– a clever mash-up of the film Gangs of Wasseypur and social media wars – The Viral Fever does not want to be branded as a comedy collective. For the group that now has 1 billion subscribers, being a ‘youth entertainment network’ is more the thing. And as they branch off into creating original drama content, this bunch
of acting and directing upstarts (no film/TV background, most of the founder-members are engineers from IIT, no industry godfathers) are doing new things every day.
Take for instance their web-series, Permanent Roommates. A serialized comedy-drama about a young girl who finds herself suddenly betrothed to a man she has dated for three years but barely knows, the show was an instant hit on YouTube hit with TVF’s target audience of 18-40 year-olds. Each of its six episodes has been viewed more than 1 lakh times, it became the most-watched web-series in the world, and fans are clamouring for season 2. “Humour is the caterpillar, drama is the butterfly,” says Deepak Mishra, one of the founding members of TVF who plays Raghu on TVF’s extremely popular ‘Rowdies’ spoof. “We always wanted to graduate to drama.”
But by drama, they don’t mean the kind of ‘hey bhagwaan! Bahu ne khichdi fir se jala di!’ kind of drama that passes for content on Hindi soaps. In fact, the TVF team firmly believes that for a certain set of Indian viewers, there is absolutely nothing to watch on Indian television. “That was the impetus to create TVF. For one generation of watchers, there is no content on TV, but television industry people are not ready to accept it. These viewers watch every foreign TV show by either downloading or streaming them online, but there are no shows with a cultural connect for them. We feel bad about it,” says Nidhi Bisht, another member of the core TVF team, and one of its finest actors.
Contrary to what one would expect – or would have been ‘normal’ even a few years ago -- none of the team of TVF actors looks at this as a “stepping stone” to Bollywood. “That is not what drives us. We don’t go around hoping Bollywood will In fact, I had auditioned for MTV many years ago, when they told me ‘this guy doesn’t have a face for the screen,’” says Mishra, who took ample revenge by expertly spoofing one of MTV’s hit shows, Roadies. Incidentally, the group’s founder Arunabh Kumar, an IITian, decided to start the YouTube channel after MTV rejected one of his ideas for a show, reportedly calling it “too intelligent for Indian audiences.”
Bollywood has taken notice of this group, though. While avant garde directors like Anurag Kashyap have always supported it and appeared in several videos, in the past year mainstream actors like Shah Rukh Khan, Ayushmann Khurana and Parineeti Chopra collaborated with them on videos. In a landmark for independent content creators in India, Shah Rukh Khan gave an hour-long spoof interview while promoting Happy New Year to one of TVF’s star anchors, Biswapati Sarkar, whose take on one of Indian television’s most popular anchors has audiences in splits.
Is creating a successful YouTube channel a viable career option
​? “If you work hard, it can be a profitable business,” says Bisht bluntly. Today, TVF has around 80 employees and a 20-member writing team. “We are making money, but there is no formula except working really hard at it and focusing on writing. Each of our scripts is unique, and even if we are doing a 60-second video, we reject 60 ideas before hitting on the right one.” And as far as the backlash against comedy in India is concerned, they are not ready to back down. “What happened with AIB was really tragic. We consider them the greatest comedy collective in India. They are the funniest people in this country,” says Bisht. “But pushing boundaries is our job. We are not scared. And anyway,
​since ​childhood I have dreamt ​about someone tak​ing​ out a contract to kill me,” says Mishra.