The Game You Never Play Alone

Cliffhangers are the hot sauce of series storytelling. They’re meant to make us drool, lean forward, smack our lips in anticipation. They are old spice, essential for closing out seasons but also necessary as episode-to-episode hooks. They fulfil an ajinomoto-like role in the cooking of compelling shows, and even the most prestigious chefs will cop to their use. The American television critic Emily Nussbaum is dead-on when she writes, “…cliffhangers are fake-outs. They reveal that a story is artificial, then dare you to keep believing.”

THE GAME: YOU NEVER PLAY ALONE is ominous not only in its title but also in its inaugural stature as Netflix India’s first Tamil original of the year. So far, Netflix has mostly dabbled in anthologies in Tamil; web series are a rarity. The world of web series is slow to take off in South India owing to factors like budget constraints, the scepticism about streaming within the film industries, and operational reasons from writing to production. It’s still at a nascent stage, even as OTT platforms introduce new series in several south Indian languages, and streaming itself is undergoing a churn in how it is viewed and operated. At this time comes The Game, a Tamil series starring Shraddha Srinath and Santhosh Prathap, written by Deepthi Govindarajan and directed by Rajesh M Selva. It takes long form’s trusted entry-level genre — thriller — and encapsulates it within a game developer’s world where digital objects become as much of a minefield as real life.