Destination Dullsville

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.

- RAJA SEN

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 flavourful 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, at best, 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 eye-roll. It’s hard not to tire of this world. Even that sweet theme music by Anurag Saikia has, by now, been co-opted by Instagram reels where people use it to underscore pictures of misspelt signage, glasses of lassi, cows crossing a street. The popularity of