Panchayat Season 3 Suffers From An Identity Crisis

This is #CriticalMargin where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows

Still from Panchayat Season 3. Amazon Prime Video

This column was originally published as part of our newsletter The Daily Show on May 28, 2024. Subscribe here. (We're awesome about not spamming your inbox!)

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Panchayat the TVF show about a man from the metros grudgingly stuck at a job in a village, is currently in its third season. Since its arrival in 2020, the series has crafted a legacy of lending cultural subtext to the much abused feel-good genre, all the while losing neither sight of nor insight into the plot in hand. Unfolding in a rural setting, Panchayat also bypassed the trappings that Hindi films and shows succumbed to for years in their portrayal of the hinterland. In its current iteration, however, the outing unfolds with merits that lean more towards repetition and less ingenuity.

Over the two seasons, the one-line premise of Panchayat assumed a narrative plurality where the story of one man existed with the stories of everyone else. It does not always happen like this. The show opened with Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) coming to a village called Phulera and struggling to adjust as the secretary (sachiv) of the gram panchayat. Most films have allowed similar starting points to hijack everything else as the physical journey of the hero doubled up as his existential roadmap. Not for Panchayat. If the first season suggested something like this, then the second season willingly subverted it and made Abhishek one of the many people whose lives the series was preoccupied with. The others were an affable Pradhan-pati Brij Bhushan Dubey (Raghubir Yadav) who conducted all the duties even though his wife, Manju Devi (Neena Gupta), was the real Pradhanji. Then there are Vikas (Chandan Roy), the office assistant to the Gram Panchayat and Prahlad (Faisal Malik), the Upa-Pradhan.

On the surface, everything appears as an extension. The terrific last season concluded with a death and a transfer that signaled a forceful growing up of Panchayat which managed to retain its sunny disposition across four years. The results are mixed. Grief permeates through the entirety of season three, rendering someone as warm as Prahlad the unfamiliarity of a stranger. His son died as a martyr, a detail which means much to everyone else but nothing to him. Prahlad is reluctant to stay in his empty house, he sleeps outside under a tree as Vikas, Brij Bhushan Dubey and Manju Devi take turns to feed him.

Written by Chandan Kumar and directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra, the new season of Panchayat excels in its treatment of grief, revealing during its run time its attunement to the insularity of grieving and the helplessness of onlookers. As Prahlad turns more and more inwards, his makeshift family bristles in discomfort. You can sense that they would rather stay away not because they do not want to help but because they too are struggling to find the words that might offer some comfort. This is why the concluding moments of the fifth episode shine. The premise is flimsy and the image is familiar. All four of them, Abhishek, Brij Bhushan Dubey, Vikas and Prahlad are sitting together and talking about someone else when Prahlad breaks into a smile. It arrives out of nowhere and the scene is elevated by the reaction shot of the excellent Raghubir Yadav, who is pleased just as anyone else to see Prahlad smile.

Malik is crushing as the grieving father. His face throbs with sadness, pushing the jovial image that his character cultivated for two seasons to a distant memory. He imbues Prahlad with an emotional heft that neither others nor the show as a whole can match. And herein lies the issue. If season three of Panchayat claims to be an adult, then the assertion comes across as a demand. The show wants to be an adult. I understand the temptation. The themes — love, grief, corruption — do not fit in a child’s gloves but the way Panchayat goes about it feels a little disorienting and knee-jerk, like a sitcom suddenly peeling its layers to reveal its dark heart.

Take for instance the way Brij Bhushan Dubey stands to be questioned for being unfair in doling out favours. The panchayat election is imminent and Bhushan (Durgesh Kumar) , his sworn enemy, realises that Dubey has been partial to those who had voted for him. It becomes a raging issue but there is a dissonance between the grimness of the matter, which includes a corrupt politician rumoured to have killed and eaten a dog, and the treatment of it. Ditto for the way a serious scene is staged at the end where a group of attackers come to shoot Dubey. It also does not help that a Prime Minister yojna, although weaved in the narrative, is repeated in full in almost all episodes like some well-placed advertisement.

The adult-like vision of the show is also evident in its insistence to make every character look human. Everyone appears to be made of flesh and blood. If the ruthless politician is ill-mannered towards everyone, his love towards his horse melts even the coldest heart. An old woman shows to be more scheming than one would have thought, an upright Pradhanji stoops for power. On paper, it is a noble intention that has a lot to do with the time.

Back in 2020, when the first season had dropped, the goodness of the series found ready takers in a world reeling from a pandemic. In 2024, as normalcy has returned, the makers can afford to push the boundaries. But the thrust threatens to dismantle the edifice on which a series like Panchayat stands, giving it an identity crisis which befitted a transitory sophomore season but not a third.

Stream Panchayat Season 3 here.

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