Live Telecast is a new series on Disney+ hotstar, written and directed by Venkat Prabhu. It’s refreshing to see the Kollywood directors, taking a new venture to explore and embrace their experiments with concepts for OTT. They have begun to stop restricting themselves with just their small parts in anthology and decided to dive in the conception of a 7 part of series. But it answers a resounding NO to the question whether they bring anything new to the experimenting table.
Kajal Agarwal, Vaibhav, Kayal Anandhi, Subbu Panchu Arunachalam, Veyil movie fame Priyanka and a few more familiar faces are only try to exist in the series by doing nothing to leave a mark. Jenny (Kajal Agarwal), a reality TV show director, has no traits to be realistic in the whole 7 parts of this series. The makers thought that they got the freedom which they don’t have with the usual mainstream cinema and how do they make use of it? By making their lead character smoke away all her screen space. Jenny seems ambitious but overplay herself, lays it really thick, enough to sketch her character impersonal.
Sekhar (Vaibhav) and Kalai (Anandhi) have got the tried and tested romance between them which is tiring to see since the moment it begins. Cook With Comali season 2 fame Ashwin plays the cameraman role to the TV show director Jenny. Daniel Annie Pope plays the anchor who lightens the mood now and then with his one liners. You have to scrap till the end to see something that you can identify from Venkat Prabhu’s universe.
The series makes one wonder if it’s really something a product of Venkat Prabhu. He had handled the supernatural trope before with Maasu when collaborated with Surya. Though Maasu moderately salvaged itself at the boxoffice, it had a new attire on the oldest trope in Tamil cinema. It piqued the interest and made to stay with the film until the end. Live Telecast starves of new elements to keep one’s interest alive. It’s far from being ambitious to catch its audience ungurard, given the truth that it deals with a supernatural trope. It’s gawky to justify itself everytime with weak stories (which entirely falls short of its purpose) to back its logic up but slips away when it has to tightly rein the pace of its course. Jenny, while smoking away one of her screen presences, comments about the small minds of the audience of her reality show don’t have the knowledge to understand the content that’s of international quality. It’s funny how the comment just turns in on them when the audiences look for something rich in their quality but only to see them fail.
