A Star Struck: Confessions of A TV Executive

There is no guide to cracking the biggest TV market in the world. What there is, is this: the incredible story of how it was done, written by the man who was at the forefront of it all.

The early ’90s marked an age of American TV dominating the world, from Baywatch to Cheers to The Jerry Springer Show. Only, it wasn’t winning over the Indian market, where access to one billion TV viewers was dominated by a powerful terrestrial network.

Sensing a once-in-a-generation opportunity, Rupert Murdoch gave Peter Mukerjea a seemingly impossible task—to grow a tiny foreign-owned TV channel in India into one of the biggest in the world.

If Peter Mukerjea was David, Goliath was a broadcasting behemoth with the weight of the Indian government behind it, and decades of funding, brand-building and a deeply entrenched place in the hearts and minds of Indian viewers. And as any self-respecting giant-slayer will tell you, the only way to take down such an opponent is to throw convention out of the window, risk failure every day and pull together a rag-tag team of adventurers to join the impossible quest.

From battling rival CEOs to winning over presidents, from making multimillion dollar deals in the back of a Mumbai taxi to audaciously hiring the biggest film star in the world as your TV host—and making him even bigger—this book chronicles the unbelievable (yet 100 per cent true) story of how a crack team turned Star TV from a quirky challenger channel to the shining jewel in the crown of the Murdoch, and now Disney, global media empire.