How ‘Panchayat’ became a second-screen show: Season 4 review
The slow and simple village series has gone from being clutter-breaking to basic and bland
I’m intrigued by the main character in Panchayat. The slow and simple village series on Amazon Prime Video, over its four seasons, has gone from being clutter-breaking and sharp to basic and bland, and now feels like the entertainment equivalent of a power-cut. Nothing moves — including Abhishek Tripathi (played by Jitendra Kumar), an MBA aspirant moored in a small village. The show is populated by fine, well picked actors playing flavorful characters, but Abhishek — the Panchayat secretary called Sachiv-ji by the villagers — now has zero main character energy. The new season sees him barely a protagonist. He is instead, I daresay, an amateur “tagonist", forever tagging along with what others are saying or deciding.
Sachiv-ji ambling along, refusing to take initiative and going along with what the other jis are saying, may not have been such a problem if the show wasn’t exclusively chewing the cud. There is a lot to be said about slowburn storytelling, but Panchayat used to be a refreshingly unhurried comedy that is now a stretched-out soap opera. Every time a character says something shocking or sharp or — most gallingly — contrarian, we are given repeated reaction shots of the other characters expressing embarrassment or anger or heartbreak, all while the background score is dialled up.
My own “reaction shot" to the new season is an eyeroll. It’s hard not to tire of this world. Even that sweet theme music by Anurag Saikia has, by now, been coopted by Instagram reels where people use it to underscore pictures of misspelt signage, glasses of lassi, cows crossing a street. The popularity of Panchayat shouldn’t, of course, be held against it — this is a show we all championed when it came out during the pandemic — but not only is it stuck in a rut, it keeps doubling down. Again, the choice to stay uneventful worked when the show was actually funny, but now, where people burst into tears every few scenes and sad music underscores bad times, it’s a drama where nothing happens.
Aided by fine, familiar characters — especially beloved ones like Faisal Malik’s Prahlad or Chandan Roy’s Vikas — Panchayat has now become a second-screen show, one that prattles on inconsequentially while the viewer can be doing other things, like changing a netbanking password or replying to emails. This is ideal for the streaming platform, comfort television that can be ambient wallpaper and therefore go on for endless seasons, but less ideal for the viewer, for whom it becomes increasingly disposable. Panchayat isn’t the only one; the show’s success has spawned a sea of bucolic banality — and now I daresay the imitators might be having more fun.
Panchayat is set in the fictitious village of Phulera, which appears to be in Uttar Pradesh but is apparently shot in Madhya Pradesh. There are, tellingly, no Muslim characters anywhere in sight. Where is Phulera? For me, actually, the more important question is “When is Phulera?" The show seems to be set in the present day, with smartphones and popular Bhojpuri song ringtones, but to fetishise the desi dullness, we never see, for example, village kids making reels — it is almost as if there is no point in showing them doing that city kids do. They are presented as children of simpler pleasures, even though the TikTok revolution in India really exploded in the heartland.
When two characters play cricket, they don’t name Jasprit Bumrah or Ben Stokes as their favourite players, but retired superstars Yuvraj Singh and Mahela Jayawardane. Is this an attempt to create a time-warp? Or merely to suggest that our villages lag decades behind our cities?
This is still a watchable series, because of the actors and characters and texture. The standouts this year are Ashok Pathak as Vinod and Chandan Roy as Vikas, and hearing Neena Gupta trying to find her way in the dark — during an on-screen power-cut — brought back instant memories of her doing that in the greatest Hindi satire of all, Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. This season is about two results — a village election and Abhishek’s CAT results — and this allows the writers to inject some commentary about the muddiness of political manipulation and mudslinging. Should a gunshot wound be milked for votes? Should a fake wound matter as much as a real one? Should the village secretary be openly siding (and even campaigning) with the current leadership?
Panchayat asks these questions, admits that these thorny issues exist, and then sidesteps them — as if that’s not their story to tell. They aren’t very interested in telling any story really, you see, just serving you something sweet and indistinguishable in a tiny glass. Even when an episode ends on a revelation that promises to go somewhere, first the characters must sit down and take a swig of tea. In this world, even a cliffhanger must be leaned against a slurp of chai.
One of the only strong episodes involves both political factions warring over the support of Vinod — a fellow who, in earlier seasons, strived to get a toilet installed in his house. The current Panchayat team fetes him and feed him, demonstrated by shots of puris being lovingly fried and kheer being solicited by the Sachiv-ji. Vinod, surprised, eats till he’s full, but eventually sees through it. This is courtship, not camaraderie. Panchayat, too, is doing what its main characters are doing—manipulating the viewer with shots of food and artificial warmth, but taking them nowhere. I think we may be full.
Streaming tip of the week:
Armed with angst, attitude, and astonishingly floppy hair, the 1995 comedy Empire Records (now on Netflix) is a chaotic mixtape of teen rebellion and ‘90s retail anarchy. Come for the soundtrack, stay for the shenanigans.
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