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Amazon Prime Video’s Panchayat Season 3 is easily one of the most anticipated web series this year. The show, which has seen two successful seasons, will have its new season drop on the streaming platform on May 28. Ahead of the release, the director of this season, Deepak Kumar Mishra, who is also one of the writers on the show, opens up about telling the story “organically” so that the audience continue to relate to it for a long time. Deepak also teases a few spoilers and discusses how Neena Gupta‘s character Pradhan ji’s position is in danger and who’ll be challenging her.
Talking about the general excitement amongst the audience for the show’s new season, Deepak says he feels a heavy sense of responsibility to ensure the audience doesn’t feel the show has become a “commercial mix bag of comedy and tragedy”.
He said, “It feels good that people are still watching the show and I hope they keep watching it till the tenth season. But when I see people’s excitement I start feeling a kind of responsibility about how I’ll take the story ahead in a way that the viewers stay excited for every season that drops. So, it is a responsibility for me.”
“I feel being organic is of utmost importance when I am telling the story. Anyone can create a mix bag of emotions by writing two jokes and then following up the comedy with an emotional scene. But it is important how these two jokes organically lead to the scene. Because without that, you’ll not feel the emotions behind the mixed bag. So the biggest challenge for me has been to come up with ways to lead the story organically, especially because it is slow-paced. In the world of Panchayat, if something happens, it is important to see how the characters react, and it has to look and feel very real because that’s the way people have attached themselves to the show,” the director added.
While Panchayat became popular for its slow-paced nature and feel-good factor, the finale of the last season was quite heart-wrenching after Prahlad (played by Faisal Malik) loses his son. Deepak Kumar Mishra says the new season won’t be anything like the earlier one. In fact, he drops a hint that Pradhan ji will have to put up a fight for her position and it is going to be challenging.
He said, “While writing the new season, our first thought was that it should not be anything like the second season. We’ve been telling the story for over five years now so it has to have an organic route ahead. It is high time that someone challenges Pradhan ji. So we decided that this season will be a prelude to the elections.”
The director added, “While writing, all the while, we kept feeling how Pradhan ji’s character has become so popular so who’ll be able to bring her down and how. Who would be able to challenge her, so we needed instances to shape the rivalry.”
Neena Gupta has often shared that she used to find it very challenging to shoot Panchayat in the brutal weather conditions on set. When asked what are the challenges he faced while writing and directing this season, Deepak said, “Execution wise, there were not too many challenges while working on Panchayat because a lot of hard work has gone in writing the script and the actors are always in a flow as all of them are veterans. So, my challenges are always because of the weather. At times, it is 47 degrees heat, or there is heavy rain so it is all muddy everywhere that we aren’t even able to drive cars to the venue, so how do we shoot? There have been times that we have had to dry up the land with the help of light to be able to shoot. And the other challenge is about the form of the village and how to shoot there comfortably.”
Deepak Kumar Mishra also discussed why he thinks the urban audience relates to the show even when it is based in a slow and small village in Uttar Pradesh. He said, “I don’t think about what kind of audience is going to watch my show and from where, when I am writing the story. It is a second-level thought, something one would think about after writing. When I am writing, I am in the flow of the story. You are only telling the story with all your heart. So you better tell it in a way that everybody watches it, relates to it. So I didn’t know what kind of audience would be watching it.”
“Having said that, we never had concerns that the urban audience wouldn’t watch it. The reason for it is that Panchayat is a story about a village which is from the POV (point of view) of an urban boy. If in the story, Jitu (played by Jitendra Kumar) is frustrated for whatever reason, in India, there are thousands of boys getting frustrated because of the same problems. There were these tools we used to create urban relatability. There is also a possibility that the urban population, at some point in their lives, must have lived in their village and that could be second-level relatability,” Deepak concluded.
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