Director: Vinay Waikul
Writer: Sambit Mishra
Cast: Shriya Pilgaonkar, Jaideep Ahlawat, Sonali Bendre, Faisal Rashid, Taaruk Raina, Sanjeeta Bhattacharya, Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, Jay Upadhyay
Number of episodes: 8
Streaming on: ZEE5
The big-picture energy of The Broken News 2 is striking. Its cultural gaze and politics feel more pointed than the first season. The framework of two warring Hindi-language news channels and its journalists remains the same. But the adaptation – it’s based on the BBC series, Press (2018) – is alive to the India in which it’s based. The references are familiar. The star anchor of a pro-establishment channel snarkily calls his neutral rivals “intellectuals,” “leader of libtards,” “urban aatankwadi” and “anti-national media”. An electoral bonds scam is ignored by the mainstream channels. Tech billionaires buy news corporations to fuel their nexus with ruling and opposition parties. Ethical editor-in-chiefs struggle to rein in proteges who fight state-sponsored lies with trigger-happy digital truths.
There’s more. A Muslim employee sells her soul to secure admission in an elite school – and a future – for her child. The son of a Bollywood superstar is framed and jailed by the government. A popular teen tiktoker’s suicide is milked as a murder to distract from murky controversies. Conspiracy theories and hashtags are reframed as question marks and headlines. A data-mining bill disguised as a national security tool is passed in the parliament. A famously liberal news outlet jumps the gun in its desperation to expose their propaganda-driven rivals. A mid-day meal scandal becomes a litmus test for on-ground reportage. When criticized for his actions, a hacker remarks that he’s a “desh-bhakt, not a sarkar-bhakt”. Youtube influencers are hired to inflate right-wing and left-wing discourse. There’s little doubt about the show’s reading of this moment.
I like that a portrait of new-age journalism isn’t coy about its awareness. It has opinions, even if it softens them by scolding both sides – liberal and conservative media, citizens and the leaders they elect – and amplifying the failing health of the fourth estate. The storyline continues from the first season, where idealistic Awaaz Bharati anchor Radha Bhargava (Shriya Pilgaonkar) is arrested on fake charges of anti-nationalism. Her rival, Josh 24x7 editor and Arnab Goswami stand-in Dipankar Sanyal (Jaideep Ahlawat), is now firmly a government mouthpiece funded by shadowy industrialist Nandan (Dinkar Sharma), but his character assassination of Radha seems to be gnawing away at his conscience. The Radha that’s released on bail is hungrier but darker. Her mentor and boss, the legendary Ameena Qureshi (Sonali Bendre), notices that she’s lost objectivity.
Radha begins to use online journalism as her personal weapon; she targets the Chief Minister and ruling party because of Dipankar, not because she cares for her job or country. She uses his language to fight fire with flames, heading the new digital wing after Awaaz Bharati is bought by ex-boyfriend and NRI tech-whiz Ranjit (Akshay Oberoi). Dipankar, meanwhile, flirts with a redemption arc; he is addicted to Josh (a perfect allegory for hypernationalism), but his quest for power is humbled by the dismantling of democracy. What follows is a dense season with the heart of a semi-fictional soap opera and the body of a true-crime drama. In terms of sub-plots and newsroom tensions, the similarities to print-media companion piece Scoop (2023) are uncanny. The two shows represent different ecosystems of journalism, but the interpersonal equations, social commentary and newbie narratives are comparable. You could say The Broken News 2 is the broadcast-television version of Scoop: Flashier, louder and trashier.
And that’s where the series falters – again. The small-picture energy of The Broken News 2 is still broken. In my review of the first season, I mentioned that there’s a thin line between deliberate pulp and inadvertent shabbiness – or, in other words, between ‘method’ storytelling and mediocre storytelling. In its pursuit to examine the TV medium, the series ends up replicating its excesses. A little attention to detail might have gone a long way, but instead it chooses to inherit the stylistic aesthetics of 24-hour news channels. At times, it’s hard to tell between a ticker-riddled primetime telecast and the actual scenes. The production value is almost the same: Some of the staging – particularly the rare outdoor scenes in cars or on penthouse balconies – is replete with green-screen backgrounds and tacky effects. A prison sequence looks like a crime reconstruction episode.
There’s also zero sense of place. For a story about reporting on people and places, it’s like no universe exists outside of the characters’ studios and spaces. Which might be true on a figurative level, but a show that runs for eight episodes needs some visual diversity. The establishing and transition shots of Mumbai lack imagination and geographical consistency: I still don’t know if the offices are in Lower Parel, Bandra Kurla Complex or in the water below Bandra-Worli Sea Link. The background score is in either tender-piano or sharp-strings mode, with no middle ground; one can go from “aww, you really love your work huh” to “oh no, World War 3!” in a matter of seconds. Ameena and her colleague Pankaj (Indraneil Sengupta) are supposed to be in love with each other for years, but their exchanges largely exist to spell out the subtext and highlight Radha’s live character sketch: “What happens to the truth in this battle between democracy and ratings? OMG, she can’t tell between revenge and justice anymore” (I added the OMG, but who’s to know?). The final episode features a long set piece in a bus in the middle of the night; something as basic as an off-screen gunshot feels like the first draft of a sound-design pass.
Radha’s partner, Kamal, spends the latter half of the season judging Radha and her decisions. The notion is fine, but the craft is simplistic; it’s as if the makers don’t trust the audience to understand Radha’s descent into Dipankar-land if not for Kamal’s shocked reaction shots. Season 2 entrants like Ranjit and Rehana (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) – Josh’s entertainment journo turned ‘serious reporter’ – are so one-dimensional that any prospect of deeper identity politics is strangled by the writing. It reminded me of the recent period drama, Ae Watan Mere Watan, where the progressive messaging was totally lost in the scruffy film-making. There’s a Jawan-styled monologue along the lines of “if one political party is guilty, it doesn’t mean the other is innocent, so vote wisely,” but the resolution is so mechanical and binge-watch-esque that it’s hard to let the impact sink in.
It becomes worse when a primary character dies in mysterious circumstances, and the rest of the team scrambles to investigate the murder. Not a single twist or moment of suspense is executed properly, and as a result, you can see it coming from miles away. For instance, when the idea is to make a hitman look conspicuous in a selfie and a CCTV snapshot, the person looks like the most obvious killer in the history of killers. It’s like the series stops just short of dressing him in a trenchcoat and hat in the black-and-white images; it’s cartoon-level staging. Even the red herrings are shameless. When the idea is to feed the viewer’s confirmation bias about the mastermind, a scene shows him making a call and the killer answering – only to reveal later that the two shots were absolutely unrelated. The ‘cheating’ reminded me of the husband-flashbacks in Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani (2012), except the narrative padding was much smarter. When a death is faked (we’re moving into peak-Madhur Bhandarkar territory here), the blatantly shady camerawork gives it away. It lingers on the fake blood and performative grief of people, and the show moves so quickly through these scenes that it behaves like a kid desperate to show off a new magic trick: Tadaa! Cue fake surprise.
I’d say the lead performances of Jaideep Ahlawat and Shriya Pilgaonkar continue to be the saving grace, but that would imply the show can be saved. Ahlawat is great at depicting the sleeplessness and hyperbolic saltiness of Dipankar; Pilgaonkar owns Radha’s reporting-in-third-person mutations. Even though they don’t share a lot of screen-time, it’s to their credit that there’s a strange sexual chemistry between the two characters (the film-making disagrees). In essence, The Broken News 2 creates these personas but it at once lets them down. There is barely any compatibility between the actors and the system; they seem to be competing against each other. It’s like watching Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma playing T20 cricket in one-day internationals and ODI innings in T20 games. We know the consequences: No meaningful titles – streaming or otherwise. But the internet will keep breaking.