Laughing Matter

WITH THE EARTHY WIT AND GROUNDED REALITY OF ITS SHOWS, THE PRODUCTION COMPANY OF 'FAILED ENGINEERS' HAS CAUGHT THE NATION'S ATTENTION

- Suhani Singh

Sprawled across two floors of Fortune Terraces, an edifice in suburban Mumbai once home to popular filmmaker Rohit Shetty's production company, is the office of The Viral Fever or TVF as the company is popularly known. Around 100 people work here, developing content for its four YouTube channels The Viral Fever, Girliyapa, Screen Patti and The Timelinerswhich cumulatively have 28.2 million subscribers, as well as long format originals for leading OTT platforms.. What binds Shetty and TVF together is they are market leaders in their respective fields. Shetty has an iron grip on the big screen with his action spectacles while TVF is a trusted entity for entertaining streaming content, be it sketches or series.

Two of the most beloved shows on OTT in 2022 came from TVF: season three of Gullak (SonyLIV) and season two of Panchayat (Amazon Prime Video). TVF's young workforce is relishing one of its most prolific and successful phases. Every platform now wants a TVF show. And when they don't, TVF puts it up on its own YouTube channel as it did with Aspirants, which has over 60 million views. That the core team of TVF is made up of IIT graduates, or as the company's founder Arunabh Kumar calls it, "failed engineers", makes its rise all the more impressive. "Now we are so popular that OTT platforms book in advance what is in development," says Kumar.

KEEPING IT SIMPLE AND REAL