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Mehreen Jabbar, arguably one Pakistan’s finest television directors, believes the reason we don’t see Pakistani content on Netflix isn’t that we don’t have stuff to show; it’s mainly just cross-border politics.

She appeared on the show Rise and Shine on Friday where host Nadia Khan asked her why Pakistan wasn’t represented on digital streaming platforms when our content was actually good and some of what’s on Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO Max wasn’t.

The director said, “I think the main thing — which everyone knows — is the involvement of politics.” She said most of these streaming platforms had their head office in “a neighbouring country” and much of their audience was based there, so decisions on what to platform catered to that audience.

When asked if she had tried to get work on such platforms, Jabbar said she hadn’t, but she should. She hoped things would change in the future, especially with Pakistan’s first Netflix show, which she said “will come out in the next year or so”.

Khan’s co-host Zohaib Hassan asked the director for her thoughts on the removal of advance taxes on foreign media, which caused an uproar in Pakistan’s entertainment industry last month.

Jabbar said she wasn’t too worried. “I feel that Turkish dramas used to be so popular in Pakistan, but now very few people talk about them because our own industry has grown so much. In the last two to three years especially,” she said.

“Personally,” she said, “I feel competition is a good thing and it makes you focus on improving yourself. And besides, I don’t believe in bans and censorship.”

Hassan also asked the director about her own latest project, Doctor Bahu, and how writer Dr Yunus Butt had criticised her work as “slow”.

Jabbar said she had nothing to say about that. “It’s his opinion, good for him. I don’t have the personality to issue statements… It’s okay if he didn’t like it. There’s never been a project where all the billions of people in the world all loved the same thing.”

Cover photo: Stephan Andrew/White Star