spotlight: HERO WORSHIP AND THE TV DRAMA

There’s no set cookie-cutter format for the hit Pakistani TV drama hero. He comes in all shapes and sizes, with varying moral compasses and vastly different personalities.

From the man valiantly fighting the forces of crime to another tackling the just as treacherous — if not more — waters of family politics, our hero has his work cut out, making his mark in stories that are often dominated by strong female counterparts.

There are ‘heroes’ encumbered with the tiresome duty of having extramarital affairs; there are those that invest a large amount of their screen-time into shedding glycerin-induced tears while they try to find a balance between a draconian mother and a simpering, long-suffering wife; and there are some who that go overboard into the anti-hero territory, divorcing women at random and even resorting to physical abuse.

 

But then there are those who, backed by strong storytelling, manage to put the audience under their spell. These are the heroes that are remembered for ages, giving rise to obsessive fandoms on social media, who somehow manage to steer the winds of the desi drama from generic territories to more refreshing, riveting terrains.

From poetic waderas to bad boys with hearts of gold, from saviour doctors to cousins next door, what makes male protagonists in television dramas hot favourites with desi audiences? Icon breaks down Pakistani TV drama hero tropes…

Producers, directors and scriptwriters play a major role in bringing these heroes to life. The actors on screen add the flesh and bones, delivering career-changing blockbuster performances. And the audience falls in love.

Here’s a closer look at the Pakistani TV drama hero genre, highlighting certain characters that become hot favourites:

The street-smart, good-at-heart son o’ the soil

With the current drama sensation Kabhi Main Kabhi Tum, Fahad Mustafa has placed the impoverished but good at heart hero in the spotlight. This hero doesn’t wear a cape — instead he wears track pants and T-shirts and vests that show off hours invested in the gym. A cape probably wouldn’t have looked as good!

 

Fahad’s character Mustafa may be a slacker, lazy and jobless — but he becomes a changed man when he falls in love. He has his work cut out for him, grappling with hefty emotional baggage from the past and struggling with financial constraints, but then you see his sudden bursts of self-deprecating humour or an emotional moment when he gazes forlornly into the distance. And you root for him.

The rich, powerful, millionaire may have his fans but sometimes all the audience wants is a scrappy but loveable scallywag with a dry wit. There’s no glamour to this hero. He rides a motorbike that winds through Karachi’s dusty, garbage-strewn alleys. He’ll have his meals at a dubious street-side dhaaba. But he’s real and relatable and he is easily a hot favourite.

The broody wadera

This guy owns mansions and fleets of cars. An army of servants follow him about and he gives orders to them as he squares his shoulders, masters a perpetual frown on his face and strides purposefully across his vast lands.

If he’s the insanely popular Murtasim from Tere Bin, played by Wahaj Ali, he’ll swing a shawl around himself dramatically. If he’s Danish Taimoor’s Nosherwan in the current hit Jaan Nisar, he’ll own a selection of very snug suits (does he have to suck his stomach in when he wears them?) and crisp kurta shalwars.

Beyond sartorial preferences, our hero’s no stranger to guns and goons and murderous plans but, beneath the bad boy exterior, he’s really just a pussycat. He’ll resort to violence only to teach a lesson to the nefarious lot that are his enemies and when he’ll fall in love, it will be truly, madly, deeply.

 

And in love, he’s a knight in shining armour, vanquishing murderous foes, threatening anyone who tries to trouble the woman he loves and exercising admirable self-restraint when the other woman — or several other women — lurking in the plot try to ensnare him by using all imaginable feminine wiles.

What also makes this guy so irresistible is that, while he’s the quintessential angry young man on the outside, deep down he’s such a poet. Sitting in his garden at night, wearing a silk dressing gown, with a swimming pool glinting in the background, he’ll stare teary-eyed at a half-filled glass — of juice? — and say a few dramatic, emotional dialogues.

In the real world, you may have rolled your eyes. On TV, in the drama-scape where this hero takes centre-stage, the world swoons and swoons some more!

The smouldering doctor

This hero’s been around since time immemorial, the focal point in many a steamy paperback, TV show and movie. There’s something about a man in a lab coat, with a stethoscope wound around his neck, talking earnestly about antibodies and vaccines that somehow has romantic appeal.

He’s Mr Darcy-esque: a serious man, set upon saving the world with his medical knowledge and, when he’ll fall in love, he’ll also save the girl he loves — who inexorably always needs saving.

 

So many iconic TV doctors come to mind; Rahat Kazmi in the iconic ’80s’ Dhoop Kinaray, Ahad Raza Mir in 2017’s hit Yaqeen Ka Safar and, most recently, Hamza Sohail as Dr Nofil in Zard Patton Ka Bunn and Usman Mukhtar as Dr Numair in Jafaa.

What adds to the charm of a doctor-hero is that he’s usually going about his job with great dedication. He’ll be attending to injured children or guiding baffled villagers on the importance of healthcare or dejectedly telling a patient that his medical reports don’t look promising. There is more to him than mere romantic notions or family enmities. He’s no nonsense, with a strong sense of propriety.

So, when this entirely rational man does something as irrational as falling in love, you know that it’s going to be for forever. In a world where nothing lasts forever, particularly romance, a hero like that has your heart.

The daredevil mafioso

This hero has his home in the moral grey area, brandishing guns and knives, making threats, getting embroiled in car chases and fights with sneering, corrupt policemen. He’s a tough guy who’s lived a tough life.

 

His friends are all murderers and hoodlums and they all live happily together in a seedy lair where they plan out criminal activities every day. But remember, he’s a hero. So, peer beyond the surface and you’ll find out that he’s really just a misguided soul with a pure, pure heart.

Yes, he kills, but only the bad guys. Yes, he keeps a gun with him but he only shoots in self-defence. Yes, he can be very scary when making threats but he’ll evaluate the pros and cons, the rights and wrongs, before finally going ahead with them. You get the drift.

In the real world, a mafioso like that wouldn’t last a day. In the drama world, he’s a powerful hero that the world fears even when he refuses to spill blood. All he needs to do is make a long phone call in a threatening voice and the bad guys will get scared. Oh well.

Given the company that he keeps, this guy would have eventually succumbed to the lure of coldblooded crime, except that he ends up meeting a girl — a brave, ethical, beautiful, one-of-a-kind girl — who turns his world upside down and convinces him that he has to change his ways. He usually ends up becoming good, fighting the bad guys instead of being one of them, making some inspirational moral declarations in the process.

 

The sad thing is, given all the crimes that this guy has committed in the past, the world around him doesn’t allow him to change quite so easily. He usually ends up behind bars or dying while trying to put an end to the evils around him.

The love story ends up being a tragic one while putting out a few strong messages. The most obvious moral of the story, of course, is that the world is an unforgiving one and the fight between good vs evil can lead to pain and tears. There’s another, less obvious, message: good, ethical girls are only setting themselves for heartbreak when they fall in love with goons from the seedy side of the city!

Humayun Saeed’s Munna in the drama Gentleman comes to mind immediately as the bhai wearing his heart on his sleeve. There was also Hamza Ali Abbasi’s Afzal in the drama Pyaray Afzal. The audience unanimously shed tears when he tragically died at the end of the drama!

The young ruffian

This young hero is always up for a fight. He roams the streets with a chip on his shoulder and the people around him fear triggering his wrath. He’s rough around the edges, handy with a gun, street-smart but, like many of his peers in other dramas, he has a heart of gold.

Send a damsel in distress his way and he’ll go to any length to save her. He may not usually be very expressive but, with this girl, he’ll muster a few sincere declarations. The two are very likely to run away together, go into hiding for a while and start building a life of their own, in a dilapidated apartment, slowly realising the pressures of adulthood.

This couple is likely to valiantly give up on luxuries because love is all they need. But when is love ever all that one needs? There are obstacles that come in the way. Our hero may shout and have a few fistfights as he tries to figure out life. He may end up behind bars. And our heroine usually ends up behind the kitchen stove, becoming a cook extraordinaire, when she may never have cooked in her earlier life. It’s a tough life, but things get sorted out by the end.

Hamza Sohail in Burnes Road Ke Romeo Juliet was one such tempestuous hero. Haroon Kadwani in Ishq Hua also fits the bill perfectly.

The secret admirer

This guy gets smitten by a girl and decides to pursue her, come what may. He may take on a fake identity and wheedle his way into her life. He may become part of the domestic staff in the girl’s home. He’ll act cute and comical, getting her and her family to like him, without them knowing that it’s all part of his plan to achieve true love.

In all honesty, this is all-out stalker behaviour and shouldn’t be encouraged. And yet, this hero is a popular one and is often a huge hit with the audience. Bilal Abbas Khan in Ishq Murshid is a case in point. And Feroze Khan in Khuda Aur Mohabbat 3 is another fine example.

Sure, these heroes lied and assumed a fake identity for days till they were firmly placed in the homes of the girls that they loved, but they meant well, didn’t they?

It comes to mind that such an obsessive admirer could very well turn out to be a psychopathic maniac. He could resort to murder or abuse should he not get his way. Then again, should he be this way, he would never find a place in desi dramas. The TV drama stalker — aka secret admirer — is a sweet guy with his heart in the right place.

The cousin-brother

This rather dubious category is an all-time hit. How does a girl get to meet boys when her entire life revolves around spending time with her relatives and meeting a few choice friends approved by her parents?

Who can a girl fall in love with when she is restricted by her parents from roaming about outside the house? Who else, but the cousin-brother who lives right next door, if not in her own home?

So what if she’s spent her whole life calling him bhai [brother]? ‘What’s in a name?’ wrote William Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, although certainly not in this context.

Cousin romances are a particular favourite in Ramazan dramas — the hugely popular Suno Chanda, for instance, and also Chupke Chupke. Sift through the annals of TV drama history and many more examples will certainly pop up.

The cousin-brother simply offers a readily acceptable solution to drama-makers wanting to make a lighthearted romantic comedy. He is dependable, well-acquainted with the family and tends to have a strong moral compass. The girl’s family are spared the tears and screaming and rants on having lost their ‘honour’, which would ensue should their daughter have been dating a strange boy from her university.

All she did was fall in love with the boy — bhai — next door.

The man with anger management issues

This hero is annoying. And even more annoying is how popular he is, which is why he keeps surfacing in multiple dramas. Weighed down by the baggage of a difficult past, family politics and a generally suspicious nature, the guy lets loose his anger now and again.

He screams about, threatens, hits a few people here and there and, then, frowns grumpily as he recalls all that he has done, in a series of flashbacks that take up plenty of screen time.

The drama inevitably charts the journey of how he eventually comes to term with his anger. He’s a good man deep down — he is the hero, after all — and it has just been his bad fortune to have suffered through experiences that have made him very angry. Falling in love softens him to some extent and, then, he is made to endure a bit more pain so that he cries and realises his faults.

He may eventually seek therapy but, more often than not, he manages to get closure by apologising to everyone around him. Lo and behold, his tone softens, he lowers his gaze and heads off to the mosque, where he finds peace through prayer!

For a while, actor Feroze Khan epitomised the angry man in TV dramas. His dramas Ae Musht-i-Khaak and Khaani immediately spring to mind.