Sony's Madhuri show launching 29 July as 'Kahin Naa Kahin Koi Hai'

It has been a long wait mired in litigation for SET and the show‘s producer UTV (the original announcement was made on 28 August 2001) and the channel must be hoping the delay does not impact negatively on it. This might well be the reason for the change of name as there are too many "bad vibes" around it.

Sony‘s problems started after Taal Communications, which had earlier announced its own weekly matchmaking show Swayamvar, slated for an October 2001 launch on national broadcaster Doordarshan, went to court charging copyright violation.

In its suit, Taal, promoted by Anil Gupta, a former consultant with Zee, and actor politician Vinod Khanna, claimed that the original concept belonged to it and that it had made several presentations to the channel over the past three years without any response after which they approached DD and got approval.

According to industry sources, Sony and Gupta reached an out-of-court agreement last week to "amicably resolve" the issue. Gupta will be an advisor on KNKKH for the time the show is on air and will get a fee per episode, sources say.

With an estimated Rs 200 million sunk in and around 40 episodes in the can, the news comes as a big shot in the arm for Sony which has three other big ticket shows being readied for launch.

Apart from KNKKH, the next two months is expected to see the launch of Russian Roulette, which is a licenced product from Sony Pictures International. The show has been a huge success wherever it has broadcast. There is also a musical format game show launching soon. Then there is the Balaji weekender series that is set to launch. It will run for thirteen weeks over 39 episodes.