There is something almost poetic about a veteran actor and television host launching a brand new talk show with a Mumbai multiplex event, an advertising campaign, a digital trailer drop and a flurry of press interactions, all while simultaneously telling anyone who will listen that he despises the “I want to be seen” culture rotting modern Bollywood from the inside out. The poetry, admittedly, is of the unintentional variety.
Shekhar Suman, the man who helped shape Indian late-night television through his landmark show ‘Movers & Shakers’ beginning in 1997, is back. And he has opinions. In a recent interaction around the launch of his new YouTube talk show ‘Shekhar Tonite’, Suman criticised what he described as Bollywood’s obsession with attention-seeking and fake publicity, calling out the growing culture of performers who chase visibility for its own sake rather than letting their work do the talking.
In his interaction with media, he also doubled down on his views, where he took aim at the trend of young content creators using profanity as a shortcut to relevance. “They feel that they need to compulsorily abuse,” he said. “They feel it’s cool to abuse.” He urged them, with the measured wisdom of a man who has been in the industry for decades, not to lean on abusive content as a crutch, famously saying they should not “try to cross the boundaries of our culture.”
Clean content, authentic conversation, no manufactured virality. The message is refreshingly principled. It also arrived packaged inside a coordinated launch that included outdoor hoardings, a digital trailer campaign and enough press coverage to trend comfortably for a news cycle or two. The irony politely declines to introduce itself.
To his credit, Suman has not pretended to be above the system entirely. He has been candid about choosing YouTube as his platform specifically because it gives him creative freedom, which is a genuinely interesting strategic choice. The idea behind ‘Shekhar Tonite’, shaped by his son Adhyayan Suman who created the show, is built around the promise of unscripted honesty in a world of filtered, rehearsed celebrity interactions. The first episode featured Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, so the show is clearly not hiding in the shadows and waiting for word to spread organically. That is not a criticism, incidentally. That is just how entertainment works in 2026.
The deeper point is one that the industry tends to avoid discussing with any real honesty: visibility in Bollywood is not something that happens to you by accident. It is not organic. It does not simply emerge because the work is good. It is built, sustained, measured and sometimes manufactured. Even a celebrity who positions themselves as a critic of PR culture still participates in media cycles, still gives interviews, still benefits from trending conversations and brand recall. The mechanism does not switch off simply because someone expresses distaste for it.
In a digital age where every appearance, interview, campaign and online mention can be tracked and analysed, the concept of a celebrity operating entirely outside the publicity ecosystem is largely a comfortable fiction.
Bollywood PR guru Dale Bhagwagar, widely regarded as the authority on celebrity PR in India, has often made a broader point that cuts to the heart of this conversation. “In Bollywood, being forgotten is the only real career risk, and consistency in PR mitigates it,” Bhagwagar had said in an interview to a website last month. “Recall value is currency. Consistent media presence keeps a career alive long after a single project or initial hype has faded from conversation.”
Shekhar Suman is, by any measure, a legitimate voice in Indian entertainment. His critique of content culture is not without merit, and the values he espouses, honesty, craft, restraint, are worth defending. But the observation that he is making those arguments loudly, repeatedly and to as many publications as will carry them is not a gotcha. It is simply a reminder of something the industry has always known and rarely admits. You cannot opt out of visibility. You can only choose how you use it.
Perhaps that is the most honest thing ‘Shekhar Tonite’ could teach its audience: authenticity and publicity are not opposites. They never were.