News Broadcasting
BBC series ‘Kumars’ sold to NBC for 6m
MUMBAI: This piece of news should certainly interest Indian TV production houses looking to find a market for their programming beyond the traditional Indian Diaspora audience. Popular BBC comedy The Kumars at No 42, has been sold in the United States, where the Asian characters will be replaced by Mexicans.
US television network NBC has paid 6m to copy the formula and title of the Bafta-nominated spoof chat show devised by its host, the actor Sanjeev Bhaskar, The Independent has reported.
The Kumars At No 42 revolves around Sanjeev Kumar (Sanjeev Bhaskar), a TV chat show host. His shows are filmed in a studio that is part of the house he shares with his family. The guests who appear on Sanjeev’s chat show have to endure a pre-programme grilling from Sanjeev’s father Ashwin (Vincent Ebrahim), mother Madhuri (Indira Joshi) and his grandmother Sushila (Meera Syal of Goodness Gracious Me fame).
Kumar is the only son of a rich Indian family living in England. He wants to be a chat show host and become an international star. Towards that end his devoted parents bulldoze their back garden to build him a TV studio. The comedy revolves Kumar and the hilarious situations that arise out of his family’s inquisitive nature and his efforts to keep the family from interfering while he is interviewing famous people.
Jimmy Mulville, the joint managing director of the UK production company Hat Trick, which is to co-produce the show for NBC, has been quoted as saying: “We needed to identify the most successful immigrant population in the States. African-Americans are already well assimilated and we needed a socially mobile family. There are 25 million Hispanics in the States so we settled on Mexican-Americans.”
Hat Trick, which makes the original BBC2 version of the show, hopes to sell the series to Hispanic stations. There are also plans to sell the series to Germany and replace the Kumars with a Turkish family because of the large number of Turkish immigrants to Germany, the report says.
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI:Â Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
