Why Pakistan's web series can't get past the campaign cycle

A medical-track kid who ended up in a film school

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Sami Rehman to the TBT Dubai studio and framing him squarely as one of the founding members of Bekaar Vines, the platform that eventually became Bekaar Films and then a launchpad for web series under a separate channel called Imagination Pictures. Muzamil flags up front that the conversation has run past an hour and forty minutes, that a round two is likely, and that he wants to understand how someone with no industry around him ended up here.

Sami’s origin story is unusually grounded. He was born and raised in Karachi, in Gulshan, schooled at a small neighbourhood institution attached to the Adamjee coaching network, then sent to a government college on the FSc medical track. He is candid that he was never a strong student in the conventional sense. “I never failed in the finals,” he says, “but in inter I got forty-nine percent — by Sindh board logic, that was a pass.” His parents had not graduated themselves and could not afford a private medical college, which closed the doctor route the rest of his extended family — a long line of bankers, chartered accountants and doctors — had assumed for him.

The path into film school was a kind of accident. He sat the Karachi University test for a 2,600-applicant programme without telling anyone at home, failed to make the cohort, and on a backup form ended up admitted to environmental sciences — a subject he describes as people sitting in a room predicting whether it will rain tomorrow. A cousin pulled him out of it, pointing him toward PAF-KIET’s College of Media and Arts. “The university’s name was in aeronautical engineering,” Sami says. “Nobody went there for arts.” The arts department was new enough that the first batch had not yet graduated when he enrolled.

Cartoons, Friends, and the case for basic English

A long stretch in the middle of the conversation is given over to the language question, and it is one of the few moments where Muzamil pushes hard against a current cultural drift. He reads out a recurring comment on his own YouTube channel — a viewer telling him to take his English to an English channel — and connects it to a broader pattern. “India is filled with English-language content,” Muzamil says. “Their TV channels exist in English. Their content has helped them globalise. As content and media has become more mainstream in Pakistan, I’m seeing this weird aggression toward English.”

Sami’s response is careful, and it is the position most of the conversation settles on. He grew up watching Disney Channel cartoons, then Friends with older cousins, then How I Met Your Mother, then The Simpsons — not because his family encouraged it, but because the shared viewing of his coaching-centre peers opened a library that his own home did not have. He is precise about what English actually buys a creator. “English is not a personality,” he says. “It does not make you stand out in the crowd. I’m just saying — if you understand the basic message, you can watch other kinds of news, other kinds of content, other kinds of people. Urdu and Hindi are the only two languages that get you that much content. Everything else, you’ll skip if you can’t follow it.”

Muzamil’s framing is sharper. He argues that the snooty class of English speakers who looked down on non-speakers a generation ago has created a backlash, and that the backlash is now eating into a skill that is structurally global. Sami does not disagree. Both men land in the same place: fluency is optional, but comprehension is a moat, and Pakistan is in the middle of voluntarily lowering it.

Bekaar Films, and the viral video that wasn’t a comedy sketch

The Bekaar Films origin story is the one most listeners come for, and Sami tells it in a way that quietly corrects the public version. He had started working in his second semester at a small Karachi production house called Big Chips, producing internal sales videos for corporate clients — not glamorous work, but real cameras and real deadlines. By his third semester he had joined Health TV. His future partners were on parallel tracks: Mubin, the most senior of the group, was already working with Engro and TCS; Jazzy was at a large advertising agency; Hreeda was interning in fashion. None of them were classmates in the strict sense.

The first thing they actually shot together was not a sketch. It was a chair video — Sami, Hreeda and Jazzy walking around Clifton on a fabric run, getting fixated on what a chair represented, and filming it on the spot. Jazzy posted it on his personal profile and friends pushed them to make more. The Bekaar Vines channel followed.

But the moment that broke them, Sami says, has been almost entirely written out of the public story. “Before Bekaar Vines, we got famous from another video which was not related to comedy at all. There was a song by Pharrell Williams called Happy. We thought, what if we create Happy in Karachi?” They shot the whole city — Pathans, traffic constables, workers — and posted it. Sami was away on a documentary shoot in Islamabad when Jazzy called. “He said, the US embassy has shared our video. Twenty thousand shares collectively. That was the actual viral moment.” Mubin joined later, the office he was working out of effectively became the Bekaar Films office, and Sami credits a string of unusually generous bosses with letting him pull cameras, permissions and locations out of jobs that would have normally said no.

By the end of 2017, the three of them were earning enough through the channel that the day jobs no longer made sense. Sami had just turned down an offer to be associate director on Superstar; Jazzy left his producer role at the agency; Mubin folded his studio into the operation full time.

”We are not a campaign-cycle business”

The most useful section of the conversation, for anyone trying to understand why Pakistan does not yet have its Little Things or its Permanent Roommates, is Sami’s diagnosis of the brand-money problem. Bekaar Films, he says, is currently on what he calls a transformation pause. The plan is to convert it into a web-series platform under Imagination Pictures. Two things are required for that. The first is money — web series are not cheap. The second is time.

“A sketch we could plan one day, shoot the next, post the day after,” he says. “A web series takes two to three months in pre-production alone. Then a month or two to shoot. Then post. That’s not the cycle brands are buying on.” His specific objection is that Pakistani brands run two-month campaigns and want everything inside that window. “Our web series cannot be produced in two months. Right now we cannot do that. And specifically to that campaign, it is not possible at all.”

Muzamil reframes this as a third missing ingredient — ecosystem. The viewer has to want it; the platform has to monetise it; the brand has to commit beyond a quarter. Sami agrees, and adds a generational data point. “When we created Bekaar Vines, the kid who was nine or ten is now eighteen. He watches Netflix, Sony Live, Zee5, Disney Plus. He’s evolved. We have to evolve with him.”

Little Things is the wrong example — Pocket Aces is the right one

This is the moment in the discussion where Sami corrects a comparison Muzamil has just made. Muzamil cites Little Things’ visible improvement from a shaky first season to a polished third as proof that platforming creates professionalism. Sami pushes back. “Little Things is not a good example. Reason — that’s Filter Copy. And Filter Copy belongs to Pocket Aces. Pocket Aces was created by three or four Indian investment bankers in the US who raised something like ten million dollars from a tiger fund.”

His point is that the Indian web series scene people compare Pakistan to was not bootstrapped — it was structurally engineered. Pocket Aces ran three channels in parallel, each with its own niche, its own team, its own fault tolerance. “Any smart businessman will do the same thing. If I’m taking a risk, I’ll take small risks. Make ten products with ten rupees each. Whichever one works, put fifty rupees on it.” The benchmark setter for him is Permanent Roommates — genuinely indie, genuinely seeded the genre — not Little Things. The implicit critique of Pakistan is that no equivalent capital stack exists, so no equivalent portfolio strategy can be run, and individual creators are left absorbing the entire production risk on a brand campaign budget.

Where the writers actually are

Sami refuses the easy claim that Pakistan lacks writers. “There are very good writers. New age, old age, both. The problem is — if YouTube did not exist, you would not be doing a podcast. YouTube gave you access. In our market we have Hum, ARY, Geo, Express, A TV. Five names. And none of those five buy the kind of script Little Things was written from. So who is the writer going to write for?”

The structural answer he gives is that India’s writers had ten or fifteen years of practice writing for buyers who would actually purchase non-formulaic scripts. Pakistan’s writers, for the most part, are still writing the drama-channel mould — the poor girl, the rich villain — because that is the only thing the channels reliably pay for. Muzamil adds that the role of “the writer” as a distinct profession barely exists locally; everyone wants to be the actor or the director.

Mid Summer Chaos, Introverts, and a comedy-only audience

Later in the discussion, the conversation turns to a specific test case. Muzamil and Sami both watched Mid Summer Chaos. Neither rates it. What Muzamil finds genuinely interesting is the platforming effect — that something with no marketing apparatus around it could go that viral overnight, which by his reading implies a good product could go just as viral. Sami’s reading is sharper, and harder to hear. “Pakistani audiences watched Mid Summer Chaos to make fun of it,” he says. “To laugh at the emotional moments. To say, look how bad this is. That hunger is real, but it’s a comedy hunger. We are not coming out of comedy.”

His own counter-example is Introverts, a web series he made on Imagination Pictures during the COVID window, backed by Bisconni — a brand whose manager, he says, had the unusual willingness to commit to the longer timeline. The first episode crossed two million views. The deal had been signed pre-inflation, which by the time the series shipped was a financial squeeze on him, not on the brand. The bigger surprise was where the audience came from. “It was not comedy. So Pakistanis did not watch it. Indian audiences did — because they had already matured through Little Things. They could relate. They could say, yes, I had that introvert kid in my university class.”

The YouTube AdSense did not, on its own, make the series viable. He estimates he made twenty to thirty percent of his cost back from ad revenue alone. “The best part of YouTube is the passive income — it pays out for life. Bekaar Films’ top-earning video is still Bikers in Karachi. That’s eight or nine years old.”

The free fall of 2022–2023 and why Dubai

By the end of the conversation, the discussion shifts to the question Muzamil opens with weight — what actually happened between 2022 and 2023, and why so many of the country’s creators are now sitting in Dubai. Sami is direct about the timeline. “Mid-2022 to end of 2023 was disastrous. Nothing made sense anymore. The brand that paid ten million for a campaign without asking a single question was now asking sharp questions about a five-hundred-thousand campaign.” Costs went up. Revenue went down. The squeeze hit from both sides at once.

He frames the Dubai move pragmatically. Muzamil tells him that when he first floated the idea — over a New Year’s visit to Sami’s studio in late 2022 — Sami’s advice had been to go to Canada and get a passport instead. Both of them now acknowledge that Dubai won by default. “A lot of people chose Dubai because Dubai was the fastest,” Sami says. “And they gave us golden visas.” There is no narrative arc here, only logistics and timing.

Sami also separates the macro story from a more personal one. “The world is not the world we understood a couple of years ago,” Muzamil says — politics, economics, the rules of how money is made. Sami partially agrees but adds his own frame. “The age I’m at — twenty-nine to thirty-three — is the most confusing age. And eighty percent of the people we know are at the same age. We’re all thinking about what retirement looks like, what we want to do for the next ten or fifteen years, not the next month. That’s new.”

By the end of the conversation, Sami offers a closing observation that doubles as a thesis about the local creator class. He cites the Pareto frame — eighty-twenty — and uses Hamza Ali Abbasi as the comparison point for how trajectories flatten. The plateau is structural. The work, both for Bekaar Films and for the audience it built, is figuring out what comes after the curve stops going up. Muzamil signs off promising a round two, and tells the audience that if they want one, the comment section is the place to say so.