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MUMBAI, India - Mothers-in-law are not a joke on Indian TV. They are the law.

Soap operas dominate prime time here and the mother-in-law reigns in almost all of them. However plucky the heroine or serpentine the plot, every love story seems to circle back to marriage and the many relatives who come with the words "I do."

The extended family is still the bedrock of Indian society, where modernization meets its match. Soap operas here are outlandish - some wildly melodramatic. But they are also oddly prosaic; expressions of duty, deference and parental obligation that inform everyday lives.

Television is a relatively young medium struggling to adapt to a vast viewing audience that respects tradition and suspects change. Like many an Indian bride, television here tests the boundaries but mostly finds its way by following the rules.

The rules can seem confounding to outsiders: India is a country where female infanticide can be a soap opera plot point but scenes of casual dating are taboo. In this realm it is the mother-in-law who issues orders and sets the rhythm of change.

Speed-clicking the remote after 8 p.m. is like watching a display of passion in hot pink, glimmering tears and the occasional stinging slap across the face. Sweet, noble Sandhya dreams of entering the Civil Service on "The Light and the Lamp Are We," one of the top-rated shows in India, and her handsome husband, a humble candy shop owner, is all for it. But there's an obstacle: Her mother-in-law is adamantly opposed.

The basic plot of "Child Bride" is evident from its title, and this soap about an under-age wife is also a top-rated show. More shocking, perhaps, is that in more recent episodes the in-laws accept the young heroine as their own and encourage her to leave her husband (he's a philanderer) and find a better match.

That may be a fantasy, but matriarchal interference is marriage Indian-style. When Indian women discuss the need to "adjust" to matrimony, they don't just mean adapting to a new husband. They mean moving in with his parents, grandparents and siblings, a custom that is still the norm, even in prosperous families.

In a country with 1.2 billion people, about 148 million households have television and that amounts to as many as 600 million viewers. In the slums of Mumbai even sections without running water have satellite dishes on corrugated roofs. Almost everywhere, Indians gather in front of the family television and the mother-in-law controls the remote.

"Women like to see their favorite characters express their own feelings, so the mother-in-law identifies with the mother-in-law, the daughter-in-law with the daughter-in-law," is how Ekta Kapoor explains soap opera transference. Ms. Kapoor, a 37-year-old television and film producer who has five shows on the air, became queen of the Indian soap world with her breakthrough series, "The Mother-in-Law Was Once a Daughter-in-Law, Too," one of the all-time hits of Indian television that ran from 2000 to 2008.

Male children are favored in Indian society, and wives join the husband's family at the low end of the pecking order, often relegated to kitchen drudge work while the mother-in-law rules over the grandchildren. "We live with our parents until we are married, then we live with someone else's parents," Ms. Kapoor said.

The family structures - and tensions - on soap operas mirror those of the audience with one glaring difference. In many series yearning and betrayal play out in marble mansions. Women are draped in silk and encrusted in jewels, a fantasy of wealth that has grown all the more seductive since the rise of India's billionaire class.

Social dynamics, on the other hand, look more like middle-class life in overpopulated Mumbai or New Delhi. Even in vast mansions family members gather in tight clusters.

The classic Indian soap opera shot has two characters at odds. One says something shocking, or slaps the antagonist's face, and the camera slowly pans a circle of men and women frozen in horror and dismay, as chords of dramatic music rain down.

Privacy, even on a soap opera, is not at a premium. As Aarti Gupta Surendranath, a film and television producer, put it, "In India giving someone his space is just rude."

The television landscape is just as dense. There are many hundreds of channels. Television is a bigger industry now than Bollywood, and Bollywood actors are beginning to do television. The Internet is not yet siphoning away the youth. MTV is here, and so are shows like "What's With Indian Men?" a youth-oriented travel show. It stars two saucy young Indian women who travel the country, cheekily interviewing local men.

But there are dozens of soap operas on the air at the moment, and they are popular. Reversing the economics of American TV, they are also cheaper to produce here than game shows. At the family hour touchy social issues like divorce or suicide are filtered through a thick gauze of sentimental tales of love and courtship.

There are growing numbers of single career women in India, and in Bollywood romantic comedies, but mainstream television is not yet ready to celebrate their independence. "An Indian 'Friends' just won't work here," said Sneha Rajani, a senior Sony executive, referring to the American comedy featuring a group of young people living in New York. "A family unit is essential for success."

Indian network executives in Mumbai watch other American TV series, like "Homeland," an action show centered around a female C.I.A. agent, and say they want to create comparable niche shows. But right now there's too small an audience. India is in the middle of making the switch from analog to digital, but premium cable is still in the future.

Some producers are ready to take the risk anyway, notably the Bollywood star Anil Kapoor, familiar in the West as a star of "Slumdog Millionaire." He bought the right to adapt the American series "24," about an antiterrorism unit in the United States, and intends to play the superagent Jack Bauer. (Mr. Kapoor played a moderate Muslim leader in "24.")

It's not just the high-tech action sequences of "24" that are daunting to adapt. Government conspiracy and Islamic terrorism are treacherous topics in a country where corruption is widespread and Hindu-Muslim tensions are acute.

Raj Nayak, the chief executive of Colors, the network behind "Child Bride," that has also teamed up with Mr. Kapoor, said the creative team hasn't figured out how to navigate the political and religious issues. "It's very sensitive," Mr. Nayak said. "We'll have to find a way to Indianize it Bollywood-style."

The issue of India's Muslim minority is so fraught that until recently soap operas ignored it. Said Ms. Rajani, "I would love to do a Muslim soap, but it's just not realistic."

The New York Times

(China Daily 01/27/2013 page10)