Deepak Dhar of Banijay: Bigg Boss of entertainment in India

“In those days, people hadn’t thought of 100 cameras, 24x7, unfiltered, reality voyeurism at its best," says 50-year-old Dhar. Cut to the present day, and Banijay recently announced the third season of Bigg Boss OTT with actor Anil Kapoor as host, while Bigg Boss with Salman Khan as host, both inspired by Big Brother, is into its 16th season on cable television. It was this show that established Dutch company Endemol’s foray into the Indian entertainment market and propelled it into one of the region’s biggest production companies, with shows and series such as Fear Factor—Khatron ke Khiladi, Trial by Fire and Aarya. Endemol’s estimated revenue in the last financial year was over ₹450 crore, with Banijay Asia targeting ₹ 1,000 crore this financial year.

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In a quirk of fate, Dhar left Endemol as managing director and CEO after a decade in 2017 to found Banijay Asia, as a joint venture with French multinational Banijay Group. When the Banijay Group acquired EndemolShine Group globally in 2020, Dhar was back to heading his old company— “the champion and the challenger coming together to create a huge ecosystem", as he calls it. But the two companies keep separate income statements and managements.

With over 230 shows across 10 languages, the two companies produce 85–90 scripted and unscripted shows every year, set to rise to 90-100 in 2024. Besides continuing seasons of shows like Fear Factor, Temptation Island, MasterChef, The Night Manager, and Dahan, the companies will also add Indian adaptations of popular, older fiction shows like Suits, Monk, and House M.D. to their roster this year.

Besides, a joint venture with former cricketer Ravi Shastri’s firm Sporting Beyond will allow for long-format non-fiction and live events. A new entity started this year, CreAsia Studio, will lead their expansion into South-East Asia through local collaborations.

Even as there are ongoing debates and conversations on content, including overspending on stars and a pullback by OTT platforms, Dhar considers this to be one of the toughest years for all creators and executives. “There is a lot of flux. But at the same time, we are a company that did not abandon linear television (non-streaming content). A bulk of our revenue still comes from linear television. When streaming goes a little quiet, we are not too perturbed by it because one of our engines is still firing," he says.

It’s a gloomy monsoon day outside. Inside the deceptively large, brightly lit Bay Club in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex, where we meet at a coffee shop, there is complete separation from the city’s chaos in its slightly Dubai-like glitz.

Dhar, originally from Kashmir, grew up in Hyderabad and Mumbai. He was contemplating his future—having decided that electronic engineering, which he studied at Bombay University, was not to his liking—when he landed a summer job as a production runner for the 1996 cricket World Cup in India. It was an entry-level job, transporting tapes, carrying cables, tripods, besides chaperoning commentators.

The manic nature of the job, being in the broadcast and control rooms and the adrenaline rush, was a heady mix that carried him for the next two months and gave him a lifelong love for the world of entertainment and sport. Those two months showed Dhar the way out of the world of engineering, where he felt trapped.

He remembers one occasion during that tournament when, having reached the airport for their journey to the next venue, he was told the flight was overbooked. His supervising manager caught hold of the team newbie and handed him some money to take a bus. Even as Dhar was coming to terms with a long, arduous bus journey, he was summoned back by the airline due to an availability. He was upgraded to business class, sat down alongside the likes of Clive Lloyd, while the rest of the crew huddled jealously in economy.

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In the late 1990s, a job as a junior producer came along at MTV India, then this maverick organisation brimming with talent, creating content formats that were novel to India. Dhar was soon part of shows such as Made in India, Fully Faltoo and working with the likes of Cyrus Broacha, among others.

“I don’t think I would have reached this far if it wasn’t for MTV," Dhar says of the five years he spent in music programming, production, and anchoring.

When MTV started including local content, like Hindi music, in addition to its international inventory, it gave Dhar an insight into mass market entertainment. Having dabbled in various formats, sizes of content, scales at MTV, he decided to move to Star TV in 2001. “I’m a curious learner and every time there is status quo, I have to move on," he says. Star had Channel V, which had a Pepsi-Coke kind of rivalry with MTV, where Dhar started with the show Jammin’, which put two unlikely musicians in a tiny recording room filled with cameras and filmed them jamming together. This was the early advent of reality TV, followed by the popular Popstars, during which he was told that the show should not be about auditions but about emotions.

“This felt voyeuristic, where you would go to people’s homes, pluck them out and in 100 days make them a pop star," Dhar says. “We really blew this format and those days I was just learning how to make these little formats of content and supersize them."

“I used to be fearless those days—I still am. The biggest learning was about ownership of content, of the good, the bad, the ugly," says Dhar in context of the show The Great Indian Laughter Challenge (which launched in 2005) that turned cricket commentator Navjot Singh Sidhu into an entertainer/show judge.

“Most of the times we succeed; many times, we don’t," he adds, in response to whether there is a secret to balancing creativity with market trends. “As the person who’s in charge of the project, be it associate producer, executive producer or the CEO of the company, you just want to excite everyone, saying that we are making the next show together and let’s reap the dividends together. But let’s make this at this cost because if we don’t land this at the right cost, it’s going to be a failure."

Around 2006, at a time when he felt like he had attempted all possible formats, Endemol was seeking a way into India’s entertainment market. The country was already exposed to international formats, like Siddharth Basu’s Kaun Banega Crorepati (adapted from the show Who Wants to be a Millionaire). He says the company had no experience in India, no creative blueprint and no formal structures when he took up the role of its creative director. “Since the days of Channel V, I was getting sucked into reality television unknowingly. By now, I had learned the tropes, the tricks quite a bit. That show (Bigg Boss) really landed in a big way. It became a great start for the company, gave me a massive head start into content production."

Bigg Boss has since become “a company within a company," Dhar says, with almost 700 days of production, in languages including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bangla, Hindi and OTT.

Dhar believes that his professional vocabulary has changed since 2008, from writing, directing, producing, “can I have 10 cameras, can I have so many lights and can I design this," to cash flow, Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation), top line and bottom line.

“I loved supersizing, supercharging all the shows that are possible. You can’t take me away from the creative (side of the job) because that’s the fun part of the business. It’s all about telling a new story," he says of his journey from producer to CEO.

After helping Endemol become one of the top production houses in television, Dhar left the company in 2017, wanting a fresh start. He swore to never do reality TV again and move to long-format scripted television at a time when OTT giants like Netflix and Amazon Prime were establishing a market in India. “It was a tough call to walk away from that seat of power, that authority that you can create anything, but I was happy to restart. I wanted to create a challenger brand again, challenge the status quo." But their fortunes were destined to be intertwined, as Dhar ended up heading Endemol some years later due to the acquisition.

He says people might not be watching television content on their TVs, but do so on other devices. He remembers a few years ago, when his daughter Anushka suggested that they watch a movie at home, Dhar picked up the remote while she grabbed a laptop.

Some weeks ago, when Anushka was in India—she is studying film and business in New York—she told someone that while she was learning a lot from her father, she also one day wants to compete with him.

“That was music to my ears," says Dhar, grinning. “Whenever anybody says that to me, I get charged on. I said, come on, let’s start the party. Let’s do it."

Arun Janardhan is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle. He posts @iArunJ.