In the times of binge-worthy dramas and sitcoms flooding all streaming platforms, the redundancy of television content has repeatedly become a matter of debate. The last time we saw a scene from a dreadful soap opera was most likely because it had been frozen into a hilarious meme. Uppum Mulakum (initial episodes directed by Unnikrishnan and now Satheesh) appears as an outlier then, persisting for a whole 1000-episode run--four full years--on primetime cable television.
In one of the earlier episodes, Balachandran Thampi (Biju Sopanam) has brought himself a second-hand Maruti car with the money his wife Neelima (Nisha Sarang) has lent him and it turns out that the car isn’t working properly. After a round of verbal thrashing from Neelu, Balu enters their home with guilt. The miffed children and Neelu angrily call him out. A visibly hurt Balu talks about leaving the house. It’s a scene that had the promise of falling into an emotionally charged, melodramatic moment in the usual soap opera, with the accompaniment of blaring background music, and spinning close-up shots.
But then, as the family remains on the couch, silent and fuming, Balu sneaks back into the scene, with a sheepish grin and wonders if he can come back. And they dissolve into peals of laughter.
It’s this unpredictability and irreverence that endears Uppum Mulakum (Salt and Pepper) to us, the sitcom on Flowers TV that is all set to complete 1000 episodes. The show, which premiered on December 14, 2015, chronicles the daily humdrum lives of a middle-income family comprising husband Balachandran Thampi, wife Neelima and their five children—Vishnu, Lakshmy, Keshav, Shivani and Parvathy. Balachandran or Balu is an independent electronics technician who considers himself too smart for his own good. Though he claims to be a whiz, the fact remains that he is not really known to repair any gadgets from the time we see him. Every day at a corner of the house, Balu will be immersed in work, with several handy tools.
Though the house is singlehandedly run by Neelu, who works in a private firm and Balu is practically good-for-nothing, the narrative keeps the husband-wife equation on equal ground. There are days when Balu scores over Neelu and vice versa and the children, though they make fun of their father, seem to maintain the same irreverence for their mother as well. What keeps the marriage alive is this impartiality—despite the role reversal and how in a conditioned family structure, this could amount to a shift in power towards the one who has the higher financial stake in the household.
There are no idols in the picture, parents aren’t put on a pedestal and the children have a voice though they are also put in their place when need be. But in a crisis, they all miraculously come together. The writing is consistently sharp, grappling with issues that are often grave and topical but it gets treated with a humour that leaves you smiling. Though the onus of the finances and the housework falls on Neelu, they don’t make a big deal out of it. Every crisis is turned into a slice of comedy—the kitchen stove isn’t working; it begins with a fight and ends with the wife and husband sharing a plate of idlies. Balu invariably converts every chore into a mishap—be it buying a car or making pressure-cooked chicken biryani, and no one seems to hold it against him.
Though they are at loggerheads, bickering about each other, and even pushing the kids to take sides, the affection between them always wins in the end. In hindsight, it’s a normal household with the usual problems. The eldest is Vishnu aka Mudiyan thanks to his shockingly bushy mop of curly hair which he refuses to trim, despite constant taunts from his dad. Though in appearance he is a shout-out to the quintessential “Kochi freaken” with his penchant for hip-hop, Vishnu is surprisingly responsible towards the unexpected addition to their family—baby Paru, and when he passes the BSC test, it calls for celebration.
Lakshmy is the typical teenager who has her share of generational disagreements with her mother. In one episode, impressed by her new set of college friends, she decides to make a few lifestyle changes—from colouring her hair to short dresses to insisting that they buy her a new iPhone to speaking English at home. Again, this is dealt typically with Neelu thrashing her with a cane (playfully) along with Balu making her instantly go back to her old self.
They don’t leave anything aside, the social message, the little sermons (about respecting elders for instance) but it comes wrapped in light-hearted humour such that we are ready to take it. Though the episodes around the arrival of a baby have some problematic subtext, considering the wife (in her late 40s) reluctantly agrees to keep the baby to please her husband, the humour eases the gravity of the issue.
The youngest son is a miniature Jughead, constantly pigging out on burgers and getting hungry every hour. Though, of course, he is quite sorted for someone of that age, and often offers casual words of wisdom to his elder siblings. Same goes for the younger daughter who quickly transforms from introverted to talkative and frequently makes her opinion known loud and clear.
Neelu and Balu also keeps bringing their own respective families into the picture—maintaining that one is superior than the other, like how typically couples fight. You get episodes where the members of their extended family step in—grandmother, grandfather, brother, nephew, cousins, uncle and aunty and they bring in their set of problems and together they find solutions too.
The longevity of Uppum Mulakum is testimony to the fact that it’s foolish to underestimate the television audience’s intellect and sit with the assumption that only melodramatic soap operas get TRPs. This sitcom is a shout-out to the good old DD days when TV serials had an appealing familiarity, and what more they continue to have great recall value!
Neelima has worked in the newspaper industry for more than a decade. She now writes exclusively about Malayalam cinema, contributing to Fullpicture.in and The News Minute. She is known for her detailed and insightful features on misogyny and the lack of representation of women in Malayalam cinema.