India, Oct. 9 -- Hansal Mehta's Scoop is everything Reporting Live aspires to be. The basic premise is similar: a female journalist gets caught up in a mess while doing her job. There's a mafia/underworld track thrown in for good measure, too. But do the two measure up? For starters, Scoop had six episodes to flesh out its story and explore its characters, while Reporting Live has to wrap up everything in about two hours. That's a significant difference, but is it enough to explain the gap in their impact?

Directed by Dhruv Tripathi, Reporting Live revolves around Sandhya (Parineeti Chopra), a journalist waiting for her first primetime scoop. Her team includes video journalist Vinod (Deven Bhojani). When a bridge collapses in Visargao, s...