Siddharth P Malhotra says Doctors allowed him to show real medical drama: ‘On TV, we didn’t show death in 1000 episodes’ | Web Series
He has done a lot of diverse work over the last two decades but somehow, the medical drama has become a sort of expertise for filmmaker Siddharth P Malhotra. The director-producer was the brain behind Dill Mill Gayye and Sanjeevani, two of the most popular medical dramas on TV. This year, he brought the genre to streaming in the form of the JioCinema series Doctors. As the series gets acclaim and love from the audience, Siddharth talks to HT about what went into its making. (Also read: Doctors review: Sharad Kelkar is the beating heart of this brilliant, raw take on medical professionals’ lives)
On difference between TV and OTT
Talking about the differences between the making of a medical drama on TV and on OTT, Siddharth says, “In all the episodes of Dill Mill Gayye and Sanjeevani, nobody died. I made almost 1000 episodes of medical dramas and didn’t have one death. People would wonder what sort of hospital this is where nobody dies. On TV, we have to play up the love story and play up that drama. Here, I could focus on multiple tracks and I had no hindrance from the platform too.”
The filmmaker says that the streaming medium, free from regulations, allowed him to be more ‘real’. “All cases on the show are from the real life, be it about euthanasia, organ donation, or the attack on police,” he tells us, adding, “On TV, the regulations do not allow you to show blood or operations. So, how do you show medical part of the medical drama there? Here, we used prosthetics to show heart, the cuts. Our actors were trained by real surgeons for two weeks. In fact, the close up of the hands are all real doctors, because we wanted that realism.”
The realism of Doctors
Doctors deals with a lot of sensitive issues as Siddharth mentions. There was one track that the filmmaker was unsure about, at least initially. “We debated the euthanasia track. Right now, a legislation is there in India, but back when we were shooting, it was in a legal grey area. Now, we can appeal to the court for euthanasia. But we wrote it two years ago, we debated whether to have it or not because it could create legal issues for us,” he says.
The filmmaker says that he and his team overcame all inhibitions because they realised the opportunity at hand. “We had no restrictions from a channel or a platform. That allowed us to do something we had not been allowed to do. But we were sure to do it sensitively,” he shares.
Doctors stars Sharad Kelkar, Harleen Sethi, Viraf Patell, Aamir Ali, and Vivaan Shah. The show began streaming on JioCinema on December 27.
