1. Have a cute looking, bright eyed kid breathing innocence. Avika Gor (Balika Vadhu) is passe. Kids rule just about everything on TV - soaps to sops, reel to reality shows! Comedy, tragedy, anchoring...they're goddesses, school kids, or sometimes merely accessories in a crowd of characters, but have them you must.
2. Cling on to that....`Cause'. You may use your soap to load oodles of glycerin, glorify the new villain-protagonist to hilt, show violence in just about every frame to get eye-balls, but just go ahead and mention generously before the episode begins, that `this serial is to depict ....cause', ideally about women or children.
3. This is a rule you dare not ignore. Always always always, begin your soap outdoors, Agra, a village, slums of Mumbai, the fields of Punjab, anywhere rustic and real enough. But do that only for the first few episodes. And quickly make sure you shift the protagonist to a grand haveli, a rich family, between oppressed household women with heavy make-up. Glorify everything opposite of the cause, but just mention that, for posterity's sake if you must.
4. Have five episodes of tears and one episode that hurts your nerves less - a dash of comedy. Never mind even if the comedy is drab.
5. If one episode of a sitcom has monologues of what the heroine/ hero wants to do further, no harm in getting them to repeat similar lines in the next episode too. After all, stretching those scenes is what matters! Of course, this must be with the all-necessary metal-beats that make it look like an epic war scene, while all you do is focus on the heavily made up heroine's eyes, or hero's boots. Now, that's a lesson as ancient as Ekta's soaps.
Pic courtesy: Rainbow Skill
