Rahul Desai
A popular comedian like Danish Sait has a cameo as a TV news anchor because the joke is on the audiences who lap up baseless judgements posing as primetime entertainment.
Scoop adapts the memoir Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison by Jigna Vora, a journalist who became a prime suspect in the 2011 murder of veteran crime beat reporter Jyotirmoy Dey.
But the essence of Scoop lies in the way it toys with our preconceived notions as consumers of modern journalism and journalism movies. Every other scene teases the gap between reality and interpretation, the cultural void between truth and discourse.
The series understands our first instinct as a patriarchal people, and thrives on this relationship between prejudice and perception. If the first parts of these scenes reveal how the world chose to judge her, the second parts are a sobering reminder that proximity is the cornerstone of journalism.
For a series that spends so long breaking down our biases, it’s strange that the Byculla jail portions succumb to the very excesses Scoop sets out to subvert. Jagruti’s time in prison is dotted with Madhur Bhandarkar-era stereotypes
The tribute doubles up as a reminder that Scoop was – and will always be – about the murder of the nexus between truth and storytelling. It’s a timely zoom-out from a specific account to reveal a universal lesson: The pen is mightier than the sword only because ink dries faster than blood.