Television serials are widely acclaimed as the most entertaining genre in India. Focusing on the characters’ family lives in different settings gave the female audience a more profound and engaging experience. However, watching women in specific roles is not seen as a reflection of everyday reality by the female audience in the Anand Nagar slum in India but rather as un-existing characteristics or traits. However, such characters are actively watched and argumentatively recalled as ‘bad women’. Watching female characters in negative roles triggered the respondents’ emotional imbalance and negative feelings, but the audience reasoned that it was still entertaining to watch. Within the parameters of entertainment and reading text, this article examined the relationship between reading soaps and women’s lives in the slums of Bhopal city in India. Leaning towards qualitative approaches and ethnography, this article looked into text, reception and the politics of pleasure in how women’s audiences intersected with bad women characters and oppositional readings for deriving ‘conscious or intended pleasure’. Thus, this study examined the paradoxical interaction between societal notions of ‘bad women’, conscious pleasure derived from women’s portrayals and the realities of women in slums.