Sacred Games is one web-series that brought a lot of fizz to the Indian digital space. In the garb of fiction and a personalized take on the story of a constable, the series tackled an important chapter in Indian political history where religious extremism was on the rise. Topicality, gripping narration, terrific performances and intensity, the series couldn’t have been timed better for our audiences.
However, Sacred Games is also a package of everything that’s wrong with the web-space today. It’s the first of web-series that normalized frontal nudity in an Indian scenario, even though it comes with a context. Though Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s character is incomplete without his sexual endeavors, it’s fair to say the makers Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane went a tad too far in depicting his sex-life, it almost became a lens view of his life in his bedroom. This is not to say that this aspect should have completely been avoided in the series – but at least it’s glorification could have been.
Alike Anurag Kashyap’s films and series that have on-the-face dialogues, cuss words in abundance, Sacred Games has expletives at the beginning and the end of every sentence, making the behavior seem cool with a certain swag. The series also consists of extremely dark action sequences that have been visualized in graphic detail. Though this brings an edgy quality to the series, it also goes without saying that it becomes disturbing and indulgent beyond a point.
Every series after Sacred Games has desperately tried to emulate this model- a dark theme, abundance of sex, a bunch of expletives, violence in their themes to an extent it has become repulsive. No, we don’t hold Sacred Games responsible for that. The problem, however, is the fact that Sacred Games made such elements very fashionable in a digital scenario that it has become the epitome of new cool to sell any series online. How will the second part fare? The digital space has certainly advanced from the days when the first season of Sacred Games released in the past. Well, success sells like anything, so much that you overlook its problems too.
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