It was the year 1998. TV channel Sony was premiering a new Indian police television show unbeknownst to the legacy it was about to create. It was CID. Watching ACP Pradyuman, Sr. Inspector Abhijeet, and Sr. Inspector Daya and their adventures became a habit for an entire generation of audience for 21 long years.
CID was the big pop culture breakthrough for Indian TV. Each new investigation brought a sense of all-enveloping mystery as the viewers grew accustomed to watching the crew and their antics almost every day. It’s been over five years since the show concluded, but ‘Kuch toh gadbad hai, Daya‘ still manages to invoke a familiar sense of belongingness and opens the memory gate.
But why did CID end? Why did the show with a stature as big as that meet an abrupt end? Well, the answer’s not all too simple, given it did not die because the show was running out of ideas or the actors did not wish to continue. The actual explanation is a bit more complicated, and as it turns out, the seeds to bring a ‘forced’ end to the superhit show were sown two years before its final episode aired.
Recently, the CID crew appeared in a podcast by Laksh Maheshwari. They re-lived their memories, shared some anecdotes, and discussed the possibility of a CID reboot, among other things. Today, the podcast has over 1 million views. Towards the end of the 1.5-hour-long conversation, Maheshwari quizzed them about why their show ended, to which Dayanand Shetty, a.k.a. Inspector Daya, opened up with an explanation.
Shetty explained the channel kickstarted the beginning of CID‘s end in 2016.
Shetty revealed the conception of CID dates back to 1992. It was only years later the idea was approved, and its first episode aired in 1998. It was B.P. Singh’s creation.
Because their loyalty lay with the creators, the cast rejected the idea of working with new producers. However, they offered that they’d be willing to work if the original producers gave the green signal.
If you think the show’s conclusion was odd, what’s even odder is that the producer, the actors, and the people who actually executed the show don’t get any royalties. Even when the old episodes still run on different channels in different countries. The cast pointed out that it was ironic that actors don’t receive royalty in India, in contrast to the scenario abroad.
They also hinted that if a possibility of a CID reboot arises, they’d be open to it. However, there’d be no CID without its original cast. And we second that!
Also screenshots have been taken from Laksh Maheshwari’s podcast. You can find the link here.
