Regressive’ is not a word used as often as it once was in TV criticism. The Balaji Telefilms’ deluge of ‘family’ drama having dried down to a trickle, the buck seems to have stopped universally at a curious notion of social relevance on primetime. From the seething chaos of the suburban joint family, attention seems to have split across genres. Is this a refinement in the tastes of TV-watchers?

Many fans of the year’s smash hit, Balika Vadhu, say yes. Here is a more nuanced understanding of the Indian family, a look into far corners of the country, a subject – child marriage – that hits the jackpot on uniqueness as well as on important, progressive social commentary. Does it really? For all its virtues, a serial like Balika Vadhu would never have aired on the socially conscious Doordarshan of the 80s, given its continual meandering from its main concern with airtime-filling episodes of cutesiness, bright-coloured festive occasions and a puzzling air of compromise in all its situational dramas. The claims that it’s necessary to sweeten the pill for shows targeting small-town eyeballs makes the whole treatment of a purportedly ‘small-town’ problem even worse. If a society can even consider child marriage with something other than outright disgust and anger, then surely it ought to question its values seriously.

But then, soap operas have never been a great genre for self-examination: that honour belongs to reality TV, another stream of programming that has Indian audiences hooked on a scale unprecedented since Kaun Banega Crorepati. The cheerful sacrifice of private dignity on shows like Sach Ka Saamna is less alarming than the manufactured concern on dramas about human slavery (daughters are raised and sold for profit on the popular Agle Janam Mohe Bitiya Hi Kijo – as if!). On reality TV, both viewers and programmers enter into a consensus reality that is more fiction than fact. No one seriously expects Rakhi Sawant to marry her chosen young man on the just-concluded Rakhi Ka Swayamwar, a rollicking farce of a TV programme. The show has a lot more in common with the love of spectacle that had us spellbound by the Barjatya and Johar sagas of the 1990s than anything else.

For its doppelganger, Rakhi Ka Swayamvar has MTV’s Splitsvilla, a show rooted in social dysfunction. Difficult to believe, it’s also difficult to like: and yet the train-wreck aspect of its progression keeps people glued to the bizarre, arbitrary machinations of the lives of others. As we once watched slapstick comedy, we now watch Splitsvilla as, perhaps, we did Rakhi - to reassure ourselves of our own superiority.

Marriage and relationships on TV are undergoing something of a crisis. Well, perhaps that’s a fallacy – marriage has always been in crisis on TV. And yet, through the utter trashiness of their narratives, TV stories have perversely managed to represent, and eventually aid a public recognition of former social taboos: divorcées, single parents, gay people. And that’s what we’re really missing from the no-holds-barred wedding blitzes on TV today – an earnest, non-judgmental challenge to the status quo. A little less of beaded lehengas, bubbly baby brides, and bad girls going good: now wouldn’t that really shake the TRP tree?

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