Two years at Kompas TV taught me something I was not ready to hear. Idealism, no matter how sincere, needs reach. You can build the most meaningful television in the country, win every award the industry has to give, and still watch your audience numbers stay small, because the people you most want to reach are watching somewhere else.
I remember sitting in the edit bay at Kompas TV, watching our numbers, thinking about those families I wanted to reach in small towns, in the provinces. They were not choosing mediocrity. They were choosing what was available. And what was available was whatever the big networks decided to air. In 2012, the five major national channels controlled almost everything. Ninety percent of all viewers. Ninety percent of all advertising revenue. Television reached 85 percent of urban households and 65 percent of rural ones, and there were only a handful of channels deciding what all those people got to see.
Something had to change. Not with me. With where I went.
In September 2012, I joined Indosiar as Deputy Director of Production. The mandate was straightforward: fix the quality of in-house programs and find new ideas worth producing.
The backstory was more complicated. Indosiar had been founded in 1995 under the Salim Group, and at its peak it was the number one television station in Indonesia. But by the late 2000s, the singing contests that once defined the network were losing audiences. The dramas drew criticism. The ratings slid. In May 2011, Emtek, the media group behind SCTV acquired Indosiar's shares from Salim Group. By the time I walked through the door, Indosiar was fighting for sixth place among the national broadcasters, and Pak Alvin Sariaatmadja was personally overseeing the consolidation.
I had his full support. That mattered more than I realized at the time.
What I did not have was a blank canvas. Indosiar was not a startup like Kompas TV. It was a 17-year-old institution with production teams who had been there since the beginning, senior names who had built their reputations inside those walls, and a culture that did not easily bend to newcomers. The challenge reminded me of my early days at RCTI, walking into rooms where people had been doing this longer than me, earned their stripes differently, and had every reason to doubt a fresh face with new ideas.
The first three months were critical. I felt the skepticism in the hallways. I chose to listen more than I spoke. But I also moved fast on what I could control: the look of every in-house program. Lighting. Set design. Camera work. Pacing. These are the things audiences feel before they think. A show can have a weak format and still hold attention if it looks and feels alive. The opposite is also true.
My first ambitious project was The Voice Indonesia.
The Voice was the global rival to American Idol, a format built entirely on vocal quality, where coaches sit with their backs to the stage and turn their chairs based on what they hear, not what they see. I believed that bringing this format to Indosiar, produced in-house rather than outsourced, could signal a new era. Four coaches Glenn Fredly, Armand Maulana, Giring Ganesha, and Sherina Munaf brought credibility and star power. The production quality was everything I wanted it to be.
The show premiered on February 10, 2013. And it did not work.
Not because of the production. The production was strong. But Indosiar's audience was not the audience for a format that celebrated pure vocal sophistication. The Voice worked on networks where viewers expected polished pop and R&B. Indosiar's viewers had different tastes, different emotional registers, different musical DNA. After the first season ended in June 2013, the network dropped the show. RCTI later picked up the rights in 2016.
After The Voice, I tried again. We rebooted Akademi Fantasi Indosiar, the talent show franchise that had once been Indosiar's crown jewel in the early 2000s. Season six launched in September 2013, with auditions across seven cities and an expanded online registration system. Fourteen finalists. Thirteen weeks of vocal, dance, and acting training.
It did not find its audience either.
Two failures in a row. In television, that is not a learning curve. That is a crisis. The conversations in the hallways get quieter. The meetings get shorter. People stop making eye contact the same way. I knew what everyone was thinking, because I was thinking it too: maybe this guy is not right for Indosiar.
I made a decision. The next project would be my last attempt. If it failed, I would accept that I did not understand this audience well enough to serve them. No excuses.
So I stopped looking at formats and started looking at people.
Who watches Indosiar? Not the urban middle class chasing the latest streaming trends. Not the affluent households flipping between international channels. Indosiar's core audience was provincial Indonesia, small towns, rural communities, families for whom television was still the primary window to the wider world. And what music did they love? What music had always belonged to them, even when the elite dismissed it?
Dangdut.
I need to be honest about something. I did not love dangdut. I did not grow up listening to it. It was not my genre. But the more I studied it, the more I understood its power and its wound.
Dangdut is the most popular music genre in Indonesia. It has been for half a century. In 1975, 75 percent of all recorded music in the country was dangdut. Rhoma Irama was dangdut's king. He fused rock guitar with traditional Malay and Indian melodies and created something that spoke directly to the working class. His songs about poverty, about the gap between rich and poor, were so sharp that the government banned his music from television and radio for nearly a decade.
And yet, despite all of this, the mass popularity, the cultural weight, the political courage dangdut carried a stigma. The very word "dangdut" began as an insult, coined by the upper class to mock the drum sounds of the poor's music. As Andrew Weintraub documented in his definitive study Dangdut Stories, the music was "rarely given serious attention and often perceived as a cheap, lowbrow form of popular culture." National media might celebrate it. But at dinner parties in South Jakarta, nobody would admit to being a fan.
This was the contradiction I saw: a music loved by millions, respected by almost no one in power.
I thought, what if we did not just make a dangdut competition? What if we made a show that treated dangdut the way it deserved to be treated?
D'Academy premiered on Indosiar on February 3, 2014.
The name was intentional. Not "Dangdut Idol." Not "Dangdut Star." Academy, because this was not a search for the best voice in the room. It was a journey. A transformation. Kids from villages and small towns entering a process that would reshape how they sang, how they moved, how they understood themselves as artists. From zero to hero. That was the principle I had carried through every talent format I ever built, from The Master to Indonesian Idol to Stand Up Comedy Indonesia.
But the thing that changed everything was not the format. It was the production standard.
I brought to dangdut the same visual language I would bring to any international music competition. The stage was designed to feel like a world-class concert venue, massive, theatrical, lit with the precision you would expect at a Grammy telecast. The wardrobe was not off-the-rack sparkle. I brought in top Indonesian designers to create custom looks for every contestant. The musical arrangements were reworked modern, layered, stripped of the cheap synthesizer sounds that had become shorthand for "dangdut on TV."
Dangdut does not need to apologize for itself. The audience felt that in every detail.
D'Academy became the number one show in Indonesia, not just on Indosiar, but ahead of every sinetron, every established franchise on rival networks. Indosiar climbed from sixth place back to the top of the national ratings.
I remember the morning after the first numbers came in. I walked through the hallways and something was different. The conversations were louder. People made eye contact again. The skepticism I had felt in those early months was gone. The hallways were not quiet anymore.
The first champion of D'Academy Season 1 was a 14-year-old girl from Cianjur, West Java. Her name was Lesti Kejora. She had auditioned at a regional tryout, earned a golden ticket to Jakarta, and stood on that stage with a voice so distinctive it was impossible to ignore. She won and then kept winning. Debut single. Awards. International performances across Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. Within a few years, Lesti had become the most successful dangdut artist of her generation, and one of the most recognized singers in the country.
She came from a village. She became a superstar. That is what the show was built to do.
D'Academy ran for multiple seasons, expanded across Asia, and spawned new shows built on its foundation. The industry had refused to believe that dangdut, produced at the highest standard, could command the largest audience in the country. D'Academy proved it.
A music that began as an insult became a source of pride. Not because anyone argued for it. Because the work spoke for itself.
There was one more thing I needed to do at Indosiar.
At Kompas TV, I had created Stand Up Comedy Indonesia, the first nationally televised stand-up comedy competition in the country. Together with Pandji Pragiwaksono, Raditya Dika, and Indro Warkop, we had built something that mattered. Ernest Prakasa, Ryan Adriandhy, Ge Pamungkas, Gilbhas, Mosidik, David Nurbianto the names that would shape Indonesian comedy for the next decade, they all walked through that stage. But Kompas TV's reach was limited. The ratings stayed small. The cultural impact was there, but the mass audience was not.
At Indosiar, I had the reach. So I built it again.
Stand Up Comedy Academy (SUCA ) took the format to a national platform with the audience size the genre deserved. The show brought in new voices from across the archipelago, comedians who had been performing in small community open mics and suddenly had a camera on them. Kiky Saputri, who first entered the stand-up world through heartbreak and depression, became a finalist on SUCA Season 4 and went on to star in the hit film Imperfect and the beloved comedy show Lapor Pak!. Ate, Musdalifah, Ebel names that now fill theaters and headline variety shows, they came through SUCA.
What started at Kompas TV as an experiment with small ratings became, at Indosiar, a launchpad for an entire comedy ecosystem.
Kompas TV was where I learned that conviction alone is not enough. Indosiar was where I learned that conviction, married to reach, can change things. The compromise was real. I made programs in genres I did not personally love, for audiences whose tastes were not my own. But the standard never dropped. The belief that production quality can change perception, that a stage built with care elevates everyone who stands on it, that traveled with me intact.
D'Academy made dangdut impossible to dismiss. SUCA gave comedians from small towns a door into an industry that had never made room for them. These were not just shows. They were proof that you can serve a mass audience without lowering your standard and that when you raise the standard, the audience rises with it.
I learned that a program has to mean something to the people watching at home. Not the network. Not the advertisers. The teenager in Cianjur dreaming of a stage, the kid in a warung somewhere practicing punchlines nobody has heard yet.
Indosiar was my second crucible. And I carry what I learned there to this day: the best work is not the work that pleases you. It is the work that serves the most people with the highest standard you can bring.
