The last few days have seen all us Mad Men fans – only those who are the lucky subscribers to Tata Sky Plus – weep into our laptops and mobile phones, at the airing of the finale episode of one of the few shows which embodied everything that appointment TV stood for. (A sadness which has led me to write a 50-word opening sentence.)

For the uninitiated, Mad Men is about the advertising world in Sixties America, hinged on creative wiz and resident rake, Don Draper, and the happenings at Sterling Cooper. The show ran for seven seasons and 92 episodes. Beautifully scripted, what made Mad Men the cult classic it is was that it not only had arresting characters and cracker dialogues, but was also a walk-through of the coming of age of advertising. When you watched Mad Men, you were transported to the Sixties – from the music to the clothes to the cultural, social and gender dynamics to the historical events shown. This was more than a drama series. Whether you like the world of advertising or not, it hooked you right in based purely on its commitment to authenticity and fabulous screenplays.

Mad Men is also one of those shows which left you thinking about it. I cannot remember the last time a show ended, to be preceded and followed by as many articles and reviews and commentaries as Mad Men has. None of us really know what the ending meant. Did Don Draper channel his inner Baba Ramdev? Or did chanting Om in a commune give him the inspiration for this ad which the episode ended on.

Whatever it be, the finale episode like much of Mad Men, made us do what all good writing or television or cinema should. Keep us talking and thinking about it, revisiting it and finally – not forget about it. This is a show, where you cared for the characters – whether you hated them or loved them or were reviled by them.

Which is what got me thinking, when was the last time an Indian television show made you feel such a connection with it? Or even made you think?

Think about it. When was the last time that any serial on Indian television evoked emotion (other than of shock) or a discussion? Did I hear Kyunki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi? Thank you very much, and go stand in the corner.

It’s not that we’ve never had great television shows, with characters you cared for. But they were made decades ago. I can, in fact, count them on my fingertips.

There was Hum Log about a middle-class family and their lives – and even today when Vinod Nagpal or Abhinav Chaturvedi are spotted, the first thing you think of is Hum Log. But the show was made in, hold your breath, 1984. That’s over 30 years ago. This was followed by Buniyaad in 1986. Buniyaad was directed by Ramesh Sippy and Jyoti and was written by the same person who wrote Hum Log, Manohar Shyam Joshi. It was a drama revolving around the Partition and its effect. Again it created household names of its actors – Alok Nath, Anita Kanwar and Kiran Juneja. Around the same time, we had Nukkad about people living in a chawl around a streetcorner (to sum it up loosely). And even though I wasn’t even 10, I still remember Khopdi and Kaderbhai from the show.

The other show I remember people discussing was Shanti in 1994. The show I remember watching and following was Neena Gupta’s Saans in 1998. It was about a love triangle centred on the object of affection – absurdly, now that I think of it – Kanwaljit Singh. It was quite revolutionary, because there was little judgment passed on the “mistress” or the forgiving wife.

If the Eighties were the acme of Indian television, we hit the bottom of the garbage bin in 2000. Because the shows which ruled the roost were – wait for it – Kyunki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and Kahaani Ghar Ghar Ki. Which the less there’s said about the better. There was also a show called Astitva in 2002 about an older woman who is a gynaecologist who is actually shown working, who marries a man 10 years younger than her and what ensues. The one show which stood apart from the rest was Ji Mantriji which was the Indian version of Yes Minister. And had some delicious dialogues between the Minister of Administrative Affairs and the department’s secretary, played by Farouq Sheikh and Jayant Kripalani respectively.

There was also something called Bade Acche Lagte Hain, where the most exciting part of the show was whether the two characters would be shown kissing. They weren’t as far as I recall.

Few of these shows will go down in history as landmark television writing, unlike Buniyaad and Hum Log or even Shanti and Saans – the latter two for dealing with women’s emancipation, infidelity and for having more than a modicum of reality to them. For all the Kyunki fans, let’s not forget that its only contribution to our lives was that we met our HRD Minister and learnt that there is nothing more entertaining for the masses than celebrating regressive behaviour towards daughters-in-law and wives.

But shows like Saans, Astitva, Shanti, Buniyaad, Hum Log, Ji Mantriji which you remember even after they’ve long ended, are few and far between.

It’s not like we have a dearth of screenwriters of ideas. There was a possibility of doing something similar to Mad Men if the scriptwriters of Dilli Wali Thakur Girls had made an attempt to stick to Anuja Chauhan’s original storyline from her brilliant book Those Pricey Thakur Girls. The charm of Mad Men is that it took us back to an era where advertising was coming into its own. Where women were moving from secretaries to partners, when TV was bringing a whole new world and mode of communication alive and when some of the most mind-blowingly creative ads were born. Mad Men took us through that journey, interlaced with the historical milestones of the time. From Martin Luther King’s appearance in politics to his assassination, to JFK’s death, the man landing on the moon. All these were brought alive with actual footage and woven into the storyline.

Don’t forget, Mad Men is an original script. The makers of Dilli Wali Thakur Gurls didn’t even need to exert themselves if they’d stuck to the book. They could have shown us the same arc of development in the world of news channels – from the sole government channel to video news and then to satellite TV. There was a ready commentary on censorship, independent journalism and the 1984 riots. But, hey, who wants to show all that when you can have some vacuous love story replace a good script.

It’s also not as if we don’t have money to pump into shows. Don’t forget Yudh and 24 made with mega-budgets and marked by famous actors and shoddy scripts. Again, 24 could have been a commentary on today’s politics – and we thought it may be, thanks to the characters that seemed to be based on the Gandhis. But no such luck. Unlike Keifer Sutherland’s character in the original, you frankly couldn’t care less if Anil Kapoor was skinned and used as a coir carpet by the end of it. And Mad Men isn’t the only show with memorable characters which has come out of the US. There’s Game Of Thrones, Homeland and even the comedy Big Bang Theory, which makes you care for the characters.

So will we ever know why Indian fiction television producers can’t give us shows which reel us in and make us feel a kinship with the characters? And don’t blame it on the audience. If that was the case, no one would be watching HBO or Star World or Star Premiere in India. Come on script-writers, give us something worthwhile to watch.

Ram Kapoor kissing Sakshi Tanwar over many episodes cannot be our answer to Don Draper and Mad Men. Or is it?