The Broken News review: The news is dead, long live the news

Sonali Bendre as Amina Qureshi and Shriya Pilgaonkar as Radha Bhargava in 'The Broken News'. (Image: Screen grab)

“Deals” and “ideals”; fiction and truth; TRP and integrity—The Broken News, the new eight-episode series on Zee5, revolves around dualities and contrasts.

Set in Mumbai in post-Covid times, but harking back to an era in television journalism when the media-corporate-politics triad was the only impediment to unbiased news reporting—as opposed to the fakery, non-truth and propaganda that informs the satellites now—The Broken News, directed by Vinay Waikul (who also directed Netflix’s Aranyak) and written and adapted from the original British series Press by Sambit Mishra, is one of the most convincing media dramas to have come out of the Indian OTT universe in recent times.

The polarities are established from the word go. Dipankar Sanyal (Jaideep Ahlawat) is the monarch of Josh 24x7. His prime time slot is a one-man show—the entire newsroom is a one-man show; his reporters and producers merely puppets. He sets the agenda every day with the motto, “News is boring, let’s give them stories.” He pays sources casually and asks his terrorised crew of journalists to get impossible bytes to further his TRP-targeting rhetoric.

Also read: Sonali Bendre on 'The Broken News': "It’s a relevant story and my character has a voice"

A few floors below, in the same Mumbai skyscraper that houses Dipankar’s lair, is Awaan Bharti led by Dipankar’s anti-thesis, Ameena Qureishi (Sonali Bendre), an editor and anchor whose team comprises journalists who follow the classical rules of journalism—thorough reportage, with a semblance of objectivity. Ameena’s star reporter is the courageous, dogged and often naive journalist Radha Bhargava (Shriya Pilgaonkar), who is at loggerheads with Dipankar over her principles, the kind shaped in journalism schools.

The channels compete against each other, with Josh 24x7 miles ahead of Awaaz Bharti in numbers but way behind in quality of journalism. When an expose on the state government’s insidious ploy to control and extort its citizens with the help of a tech giant threatens to topple both government and the two channels, the battle between Dipankar and Radha becomes momentous. Who will side with the establishment and who will be the unequivocal truth-teller? Both Radha and Dipankar have personal stake in the story they are exposing that includes the death of Radha’s roommate, another fearless journalist, and Dipankar’s attempt to retain his only vulnerable, human impulse—to be close to his adolescent daughter caught in the throes of his ugly divorce.

Despite the binaries The Broken Room projects, it can be enthralling. This is a show, presumably for an audience for whom TV news was a revolution in their living rooms—Indians who now crib about its ethical and intellectual downslide and feel personally invested in the future of media. If you’re not at least casually curious about the ideological and ethical fault lines of the Indian TV news industry, this might not be the show for you. With his two central characters, the writer sets up a conflict that demands an answer to the question, what purpose does journalism serve, while also letting his audience voyeuristically experience the thrill of chasing stories and bytes.

Radha claims the moral high ground throughout, while some of her actions and processes of finding news are themselves questionable. So like Dipankar, she too has flaws, but what sets her apart is her overarching need to keep digging until the whole truth emerges—the kind of journalists who’re increasingly becoming relics—at the cost of a life beyond her newsroom and sources.

There's nothing subtle about Dipankar—he combines a burn-it-all-down energy with a unique brand of pragmatism that’s difficult not to buy into. He is calm through confrontations with the home minister as well as the man who owns Josh 24x7. He has an escort for company at his stark home, who he is not only attached to, but is kind to.

While Pilgaonkar imbues a steely energy to the role of Radha, rarely out of character, the show’s force comes from Ahlawat’s performance. He personifies the paradoxes of his character in a way that makes disliking Dipankar as easy as seeing the uneasiness that is within him about his situation. In perhaps the first cerebral role of her career, Bendre is a balanced combination of enthusiasm, restraint and conviction.

The entire cast is effective, with Akash Khurana playing Dipankar’s timid boss; Faisal Rashid and Sanjeeta Bhattacharya playing Radha’s loyal colleagues and friends. Srikant Yadav is the home minister, and Taaruk Raina is a compromised reporter at Josh 24x7.

The Broken News gets many things right about the rot in the fabric of Indian society and media. One of my most favourite parts of the show is the closing credits, because a beautifully-rendered version of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s "Bol Ke Lab Azaad Hai Tere" plays over them. Ultimately, how Dipankar or Radha get to their version of the truth not as important as the fact that they can still speak it.