There was a time when binge-watching meant unwinding after a day’s hard work to touch the soft sheets and find the perfect movie recommendation waiting for you. Plot twists were so lethal that they made you gasp, characters you wanted to text at 2 AM, and storylines that didn’t come with a déjà vu warning. However, OTT lately has been a snooze fest designed by your ex: too familiar and oddly predictable. Welcome to the age of algorithmic storytelling, where every show feels like a remix of an old Bollywood song. But the villain is not on your screen, it is in your recommendation engine.Ctrl+C, Ctrl+PlotClick on one show about a small-town cop with a dark past, and suddenly every platform starts feeding you crime thrillers, preferably with brooding male leads, a drone shot of dusty roads, and the same four background scores. “I watched one political drama during the elections, and now my entire homepage looks like a Lok Sabha playlist,” says Ankita Nair, a Mumbai-based designer. “Even the thumbnails are just men scowling in the shadows.”Where is the surprise?The genre mashups? The absolute weirdness that made shows like Sacred Games, Paatal Lok, or even Made in Heaven feel so fresh? The answer: buried under a pile of data points and content dashboards.Built by BotsStreaming platforms, like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and others, rely on data that monitors what you watch, how long you watch, when you drop off, and which thumbnails get clicks. In theory, this helps them serve you better content. In practice, it often leads to shows being written for algorithms, not audiences. Since the human mind isn’t always going to watch a crime thriller, sometimes a Rom-com and Mystery might just be the go-to.“The problem isn’t just recommendation fatigue. It’s creation fatigue,” says Aakash Mehta, a screenwriter for web series. “Writers are told to include certain tropes because ‘that’s what’s trending.’ Risk-taking gets replaced with checklist-writing.”Shows like Kohrra (Punjabi), Suzhal (Tamil), and Tooth Pari (Bengali-English hybrid) don’t feel like they were spat out by a machine. They’re specific, layered, and often bonkers in the best way. Amid this content cloning, something is happening off the mainstream radar– filmmakers are getting bolder, weirder, and more fun. In these shows, you get the cultural quirks, unpolished dialogues, characters that don’t look like influencers, they resemble real-life people, and their stories.Weird Desi DelightShort films, interactive fiction, mockumentaries – experimental formats are becoming the indie rebellion to the OTT sameness. Creators are bypassing the bot by producing 15-minute horror shorts on YouTube, Instagram short reels with vertical storytelling and a mini Netflix series that capture the right audience. “You can’t data-optimise originality,” says Anirudh Singh, a digital content strategist. “Algorithms can recommend, but they can’t create taste. That still belongs to humans.”While the algorithm isn’t going anywhere, there is hope within the audience— creators are pushing back and turning out the data noise, and smaller platforms are making room for stuff that is original and not just a spitting version of a series seen before. The best way to catch them off guard is to Go weird. Go regional. Go rogue. Stop all that unnecessary clicking over thumbnails, start searching for films that push out from the recommended list that is being presented in front of you. Maybe a Gujarati sci-fi sitcom. Or a Manipuri love story told backwards. After all, the best algorithm is still good, old-fashioned curiosity.
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