Zee's flip flop continues; Antara ends as Do saheliyaan takes its slot

Just when things looked bright for Antara one didn’t know that the respite was temporary. Aapki Antara which drew critical acclaim is finally coming to a close as the channel has decided to alter its decision of retaining it. Replacing the show will be Ratna Sinha’s Do saheliyaan . As reported earlier, the channel had decided to give a breather to Antara by retaining it and launching Saheliyaan at an early evening slot of 7:00 pm. The show which was to originally run for 260 episodes will end after completing 175 episodes. Do saheliyaan will launch on 1 March. According to a source from the show, “The production house had Antara and Billu’s love story in the planning and were religiously working on it. But the channels informed them that they will have to wrap up the show by the 18th of this month. According to the story Antara would have become a singer thus inspiring everyone. Billu acknowledging her dedication and conviction, vows to change himself for good. He eventually falls for her and marries her. But now we are all worried as to how we will end it on such a short notice. One feels that the show wasn’t really promoted well post the introduction of the generation leap.” Confirming the news of Antara concluding on 18 February, producer Monish Sekhri says, “Yes, our show is ending on 18th of this month. We weren’t expecting that the show will end so soon and had planned the end accordingly. According to our original script, Antara was to grow up to 52 years get married to Billu and they have a 16-year- old daughter who will not be autistic. The entire track was about how Antara inspires the lives of every single person around her. How she transforms Billu from a spoilt brat to a responsible man and her brother Abhishek eventually has a change of heart and accepts her as his sister.” So what led to the debacle of the show and its constant dipping TRPs? “I would admit that the change in the time slot did result in the decline in the TRPs as 10:30 pm is too late a time-slot for a show that’s not a regular soap. The show did extremely well at 8:30 pm and we saw other shows on rival channels being shifted to a new timing like Kis desh mein hai meraa dil and Jai shri Krishna . They say the generation leap too affected the TRPs of the show as Zaynah Vastani (youngest Antara) became extremely popular but then I can’t deviate from my original storyline just for the viewership. When I wrote the first five episodes of the show and Anuradha’s character was shown dead in the very first episode, I was posed with queries like why the character is ending in just one episode. For me the logic was simple, it had to be original and I was convinced that the character had to die”, says the producer. On an ending note, Sekhri says, “I am not in the business of story telling, I can just write stories. I strongly feel that we must try innovative noble concepts rather than just showing regressive stories. It feels that we have gone back by 100 years with the kind of shows we are being made to watch. I am not against saas-bahu soaps but it’s just about the manner in which we tell the tales.” We sent a text message to Ratna Sinha, producer Do saheliyaan and Sukesh Motwani, Zee TV Fiction Head, but both didn’t