Market For Melodrama ?

Some of you might have been familiar with the concept called market for lemons. In brief this phrase deals with the markets in cases of asymmetrical information.

Now I have never understood the concept per se* and this post is not about it. Rather it is about a different case. Now I am sure I am not the only one who believes that quality of serials was, in general, far better when we had only channel (i.e. Doordarshan) than present scenario, and this applies across all genres. Now I am not someone best described as a passive viewer, so I don’t mind ordinary junk, but for some reason almost all the serials have descended to the melodramatic depth that they deserve a special category for hazardous effect (unparalleled emotional atyaachaar, to borrow from Dev D ). Why this has happened is not at all clear to me (hence the question mark). In general competition is supposed to be good, yet what has happened is the opposite. I do understand that when competition is cutthroat, it is not possible for a generic channel to broadcast anything except what it thinks is the safest bet (in this case despairing melodrama). However this doesn’t explain absence of even a niche channel for such programming. Which is why it will be interesting to find out if this phenomenon can be explained if modeled in terms of economics.

 

* More accurate would be to say that I was not convinced by the example cited for this, viz that of second hand cars. The explanation went that since seller always had more information about the used car than the buyer the resulting asymmetry will prevent formation of a stable market. My problem is, the same applies to the case of first hand goods also (i.e. seller knowing more than the buyer), but that’s hardly a problem there.