Why did the Tamil Rockerz web series not work well with the audience?

Recent Tamil web series titled Tamil Rockerz, by filmmaker Arivazhagan of Eeram and Vallinam-fame, falls into this category.

Promoted as a story that elaborates on the origin and growth of the infamous cyber piracy platform Tamil Rockers, the Arun Vijay-starrer series was supposed to discuss the same in detail. But the research or the writing seems not to have progressed towards that.

A routine cop story

Arun vijay’s Tamil Rockerz didn’t go down well with the audiences for various reasons. (arunvijayno1/Twitter)

At a superficial level, Tamil Rockerz might look like a decent investigation-thriller with a cat-and-mouse game being played by the police department and the cyber-criminals. But take a deeper look, and it is just another police story — like the ones we have watched on big screens all these years.

The narrative style and the story arc of a web series have a grammar that is different from big-screen film-writing. It does not follow the usual three-act structure of introduction-confrontation-resolution.

The conflict in a web series needs to be manifold, and it should keep getting complicated with every episode before reaching the “all is lost”‘ phase for the protagonist. For that, a series like Tamil Rockerz should have been narrated with the crime world at its centre.

Take a series like Mirzapur, or Breaking Bad for that matter. They explore a similar crime world in their plot as well. However, the story is narrated from the perspective of the crime itself.

Their protagonists are those who commit the crime first-hand. So, when the audience sees the world of Mirzapur, Auto Shankar, Sacred Games or Breaking Bad from their point of view, the narrative organically wanders and halts at the darkest corners of the world.

Of late, even films from Kollywood have begun painting themselves in such dark shades. Vikram Vedha, Vada Chennai, Kaithi and Jigarthandaa are a few ideal picks where the protagonist is in a dark or grey shade.

In the police’s shoes

Tamil Rockerz, on the other hand, puts itself in the police’s shoes from the very first scene — and places the crime and its committers in a third-person space. What we get to see, therefore, is what the police know and nothing much else.

In a series like Scam 1992, for instance, the audience knows much more about Harshad Mehta and his actions and motivations than the CBI personnel or the journalists following him. That made the viewers want to root for the protagonist.

Though the series faced a lot of criticism for romanticising Mehta and his scam, as a narrative, it was engaging and experimenting.

ಸಿನಿಮಾ ತಂಡದ ಕನಸುಗಳನ್ನು ಒಂದು ನಿಮಿಷದಲ್ಲಿ ನುಚ್ಚುನೂರು ಮಾಡೋ ಇವರು ಯಾರು?
ವೀಕ್ಷಿಸಿ ‘ತಮಿಳ್ ರಾಕರ್ಸ್’ ಈಗ #SonyLIV ನಲ್ಲಿ. #TamilRockerzOnSonyLIV #TamilRockerzSonyLIV @arunvijayno1 @dirarivazhagan @vanibhojanoffl @ishmenon @DopRajasekarB @arunaguhan_ @EditorSabu @vikasbadisa pic.twitter.com/yY6HMChN9v

— AVM Productions (@avmproductions) August 22, 2022

Fails to explore the crime world

Secondly, though it was shot from an investigator’s perspective, Tamil Rockerz couldn’t even be a coming-of-age investigation drama. The police chase we see in this series is nothing new to us.

What Gautham Menon and Hari have been doing in their films is being done here. There’s a hero, who is a cop going through a personal life trauma. He finally ends up with a ground-breaking case.

Suzhal , streaming on Amazon Prime, is a proper investigation drama. (PrimeVideoIN/Twitter)

Why do we need a long-form story narration to glorify a hero’s skillsets and machoism? We already have films that glorify the masculinity and purity of our heroes for that, right?

Why don’t our web series focus on the investigation rather than the investigator? Well, these are a few questions that keep popping up throughout the runtime of Tamil Rockerz.

Investigation dramas in the OTT space have started exploring the unexplored. Let’s take Delhi Crime or Tamil’s own Suzhal, for instance. Both these series are whodunits, where the criminal takes the back seat.

But their story arcs are designed in such a way that the hunt for the antagonist is made very complex — and whenever the audience thinks the case is solved, it isn’t. If we analyse Tamil Rockerz from that perspective, it again is a disappointment.

No backstory for criminal

This series neither explores the world of crime nor the complexities in the investigation. To top of it all, the antagonist of this series is one of the most poorly-written villains in recent times.

Even though his back story has so much potential to make him a reasonable villain one could root for, the writing failed to complement that.

When a movie or a series is based on true events that people are told through media and the internet, over and over again, it naturally gains attention.

But when the film is going to narrate the same story that was told all these years, the difference it would make becomes the subject of criticism.

Delhi Crime, for that matter, showed the untold version of the hunt for the criminals of the Nirbhaya rape case.

Shefali Shah in Delhi Crime, which is streaming on Netflix. (NetflixIndia/Twitter)

With no such detail on the crime, a deep backstory for the criminal, and no innovation in writing a neo-noir screenplay, Tamil Rockerz stands as a series that will just say why one shouldn’t watch pirated films.

One can’t root for a character or the victims, but just see a visualised version of a two-column bit news of crime in a vernacular daily.

Over-The-Top story & scenes

When it comes to a web series, people invest more time and mind space than a film — even sometimes binge-watching content. It’s high time filmmakers empathised with that. One doesn’t spend six or seven hours watching or listening to something one already knows.

When cinema started to emerge as a public medium in the 1940s and 1950s, movies like Parasakthi, Andha Naal, Bommai and Velaikkari started to socialise the art form by showing house-next-door characters and very relatable conflicts.

Till then, the stories shown on the big screen mainly were of kings or gods that were super-heroic in nature. Now with series like Tamil Rockerz, the craft is again hanging in limbo due to their “Over-The-Top” stories and scenes.

Or, did our filmmakers actually misunderstand the abbreviation of OTT? Who knows!