Time: who has it?

There is a terrific race against time that we run every day. From the moment we wake up, to the second we finally close our eyes to sleep, our days are filled with work, tending to relationships, eating, and although this is supposed to be a leisure activity, taking in content on the many, many, many, scr-eens and platforms available to us now.

Honestly? I’m exhausted. I cannot keep up with everything that is a must-watch. Apart from the obvious preference of genre – e.g. there is just something about the fantasy genre that I find boring – there is time commitment too. Before jumping into any web or TV series, one must consider the number of episodes per season, and duration per episode. Anything north of 35 minutes requires the show/film to be excellent or of the so-bad-it’s-good variety (Cell 2, I’m looking at you). Otherwise, you’ve spent about two hours of your life watching something so mediocre you may as well have not existed for that time, because sleep is obviously still productive (Lift Boy, I’m looking at you).

So what fits the criteria for someone like me, who has various attention span and commitment issues when it comes to entertainment, as well as very specific sub-genres of interest; e.g. cosy supernatural features or shows rather than slasher, sci-fi, or psychological/slow-burn.

The answer, that existed all along, are anthology series.

While we have all consumed content in that format, it didn’t really register that feature films can also work as parts of an overarching theme within an anthology. Of course, Netflix started rotating the anthologies it hosts prior to the release of Lust Stories 2, and of course, as we are all slaves to the algorithm, I had no choice but to watch in quick succession, Bombay Talkies, Lust Stories, Ghost Stories, Ajeeb Dastaans.

And just as my brain had only begun to marvel at the wonder that is the short feature, Pakistan saw the release of Teri Meri Kahaniyaan, which has found praise more or less across the board. Though TMK doesn’t fall under any one theme, it is one of those slice-of-life stories that remind you why life is worth living.

So when content like that comes up on our home turf, we have to then wonder about the relevance of drama series, or long-running soaps. In the case of the former, in the age of the streaming platform, is an episode a week perhaps redundant? In the case of the latter, soaps that go on air every day, and run for months or years, rely on constant conflict or tired humor to fill the time slot. The serial formula has worked in the past because we had limited choices, and the soap works for a time, and then the audience starts dropping off.

To be completely fair to channels and directors in Pakistan, we’ve had the telefilm for way longer than the anthology became popular, and there has never been a dearth of good storytellers in Pakistan.

What we are consistently fighting is a dearth of stories. There are of course, the money makers, the bad boys and anti-heroes, the good girls who turn them, the saas, bahu aur saazish sagas,

the long-suffering wives, the long-suffering husbands, the long-suffering household staff who witnesses all the drama and jugs of juice served at breakfast for some reason. And as living, breathing human beings who happen to live in Pakistan, we know there are stories our writers and directors are not even touching.

There has never been, and I can vouch for this, a series about a woman trying to work a corporate job. You can saddle her with kids or in-laws or misogynistic bro-thers, or you could simply show her professional journey, because that in itself may just be dramatic enough with the hustle culture and the glass ceilings and the blatant misogyny women face at the workplace.

You could - as Saim Sadiq did in Joyland - point to the system that consistently fails men as well, by placing expectations upon them in terms of the physical traits they must possess or the responsibilities they should fulfil.

We could, considering the millions of women now who juggle careers with a family life IRL, and the men and women who choose to leave harmful partnerships in a very judgmental society, at all ages, tell those stories. And they don’t have to have 16-episode arcs. Or they could perhaps be released all together in the streaming model.

The sponsorships will come, as will the audience. We would all rather watch the drama on YouTube rather than on television more often than not, because at least some YouTube ads will be skippable.

But perhaps we aren’t ready, for the format, or the stories. Once we start telling the very real stories that exist within Pakistan, we will have to be prepared for the inevitable backlash once questions regarding cultural or religious beliefs start cropping up.

The shows may retain and engage the audience, but might lose out on sponsors who don’t want to be affiliated with something that the masses find unsavory. We did ban and then censor Joyland, which was mostly a benign domestic story, with issues of queerness on the periphery.

And that in itself puts a hard stop on the possibilities of the anthology in Pakistan. If we want to tell many stories, as many stories as we can, the stories that come from the heart and resonate with our souls, then we have to be prepared to talk about the things we don’t think belong out in the open. And that doesn’t mean we need to talk about only controversial topics.

We are sitting on a landmine of generational trauma; passed down by some of the silent generation that emigrated to Pakistan in 1947. We are sitting on decades of political and economic dysfunction. We are a nation in a constant state of post-traumatic stress, and most of us cope by joking about it.

Not only do we have the stories, we can also tell them across every single genre that exists.