Kaun Banega Crorepati turns 25: ‘Show endured because Amitabh Bachchan stayed loyal to it, Star cancelled it after Shah Rukh Khan's season,' recalls Sameer Nair

Indian Express

17 hours ago

When Sameer Nair became the head of programming at StarPlus, it had just become a Hindi-language entertainment channel. After eight years of broadcasting international shows since the cusp of liberalization in 1992, StarPlus had decided to enter the new millennium with a new identity: become a Hindi General Entertainment Channel (GEC) and compete with what was hitherto its Hindi counterpart, Zee TV.
'We were partners with Zee before, then we'd gone independent so the mandate was: Fight back!,' recalls Nair, in an exclusive interview with SCREEN. However, that was an uphill battle since Zee TV dominated the TRPs, followed closely by Sony, and StarPlus at a distant third. 'For numbers' sake, let's say Zee was at 12 rating, Sony was at 11, and Star was at 1. That was the landscape then,' says Nair.
Which is when Nair and his team officially acquired the adaptation rights of the popular British show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Amitabh Bachchan, once a tour de force at the movies, was a fading movie star at 58. He was delivering duds like Lal Baadshah, Sooryavansham, Hindustan Ki Kasam, and Kohram in 1999 before he was approached to host the quiz show Kaun Banega Crorepati.
'When we first went to him, it was a complicated because it was TV and he was a film star,' says Nair. The naysayers included Amitabh's wife and veteran actor Jaya Bachchan herself, who felt that 'it was somewhere not correct to shrink him to the small screen.' In order to convince himself, Amitabh even visited the sets of the original British show in London before finally giving his nod to host KBC.
'Once he took to the show, he stayed loyal to it. Mr. Bachchan is the only one who's been doing it since then, till now,' points out Nair, adding, 'The love of the audience for Mr. Bachchan has been really enduring. When we first did KBC, there was no Google. Which means you had to really wait through the break to get the correct answer. But even now, when he asks the question, you can Google it, yet you don't. Because you want to watch the show, the drama, and the playout the way it's intended.'
The historic inaugural season of KBC not only catapulted StarPlus' dwindling ratings, but also reinstated Amitabh's film career. The quiz show made him reach every household again and lent his image a much-needed makeover. He went on to star in hits like Aditya Chopra's Mohabbatein (2000), Karan Johar's Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… (2001), Vipul Shah's Aankhen (2002), BR Chopra's Baghban (2003), Yash Chopra's Veer-Zaara (2004), Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black (2005), Shaad Ali's Bunty Aur Babli (2005), and Ram Gopal Varma's Sarkar (2005).
Despite his extraordinarily remarkable second innings in the movies, Amitabh remained grateful and loyal to KBC by returning to host the second season of the quiz show in 2005. But Amitabh's sudden, prolonged illness in 2006 halted production as he couldn't shoot for the remainder of 24 episodes. There was no contestant who could thus win the top prize of Rs 2 crore that season.
Bachchan reportedly declined the third season in 2007, prompting StarPlus to reach out to Shah Rukh Khan as the replacement. Khan, who had worked with Amitabh in Mohabbatein, K3G, and Karan Johar's Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006), had already filled in Amitabh's shoes by reprising the character made famous by him in Chandra Barot's Don (1978) in its 2006 official remake helmed by Farhan Akhtar.
But even Khan couldn't summon the same interest as Amitabh did in the first two seasons of KBC. The show's ratings dropped significantly, forcing StarPlus to pull the plug on it after season 3. Three years later, Sony Entertainment Television revived the quiz show for its fourth season, with Amitabh returning as the host. The show has successfully run till its 16th season last year, and has been renewed for the 17th this year. Amitabh Bachchan has simultaneously maintained his stronghold both in films and on KBC as its recurring host ever since.
Nair, whose tenure at StarPlus ended with the discontinuation of KBC in 2007, is now the Chief Executive Officer of Applause Entertainment. He lauds his then-competitor for keeping KBC alive at a time when its original home had given up on it. 'The credit also goes to Sony for reviving it. We did two seasons with Mr. Bachchan and one with Shah Rukh, and then we let go. They took it forward and really built it in the last 10 years so that we could get to the 25th anniversary,' he says.