KBC gets a replacement

Fox Production will debut on Star Plus with a musical to fill the gap left by SRK.

With Shahrukh Khan's moneyspinner Kaun Banega Crorepati's (KBC's) season coming to an end on April 19, Star Plus will be looking to cover up it's weekday prime time band of 9-10 pm with two new family dramas. A channel that refrains religiously from experimenting with serial formats, it hopes to hit gold with its new primetime line-up "" albeit in the genre of family dramas.

For the 9 pm slot, Fox Production will debut with its first ever prime time show, Meri Awaaz Ko Mil Gayi Roshni (MAKMGR), replacing KBC from 23 April. The 9.30 pm slot will see the inclusion of yet another Balaji family drama, titled Kasturi.

Deepak Segal, head of Fox Television Studios, India, has only sweet words of praise for Fox's debut act. "It's a different show," he said, adding, "MAKMGR's story revolves around a young girl who is a singer from a small town and comes to the big bad city to make a name for herself and soon finds herself in love with a rich city boy."

Sounds familiar, does it? Not to Segal. "What makes MAKMGR different is its songs. And with seven songs exclusively recorded for the tele-musical, we will continue the song-and-drama tryst," he says.

The channel is also planning to release a music CD along with the serial's launch. Fox Studios is also ready with an afternoon family drama that will be aired on Star Plus and will launch a few non-fiction television shows by August-September.

"The roadmap for Fox Studios includes tapping the new media space like the IPTV platform for interactive programming and mobile episodes of a few popular serials that are on our radar this year," shares Segal.

On an average, a television serial requires an investment of around Rs 10 lakh (to begin with) but Fox's idea of a musical instead of run-of-the-mill family dramas is going to cost the company a tad higher. Harsh Rohtagi, general manager (marketing and content), Star India, is convinced that MAKMGR will get the ratings.

He says, "The target audience is the general soap audience that primarily consists of women aged between 15-35 years. Being an emotional love story woven with a musical backdrop, it has everything that we need for our weekday primetime bands."

While talks for a second season of KBC have been confirmed by Rohtagi, he was unwilling to share the launch dates.

"We are very sure that KBC and Shahrukh will be back for a second season and since we had a good first season, you can expect the channel to capitalise on brand KBC," Rohtagi confirms.

KBC opened strong with a rating of 12.3 but eventually fell to 7-8 TVR points, which is way lower than its family dramas that score on an average a TVR of 12-13.