On screen — as it is in life — matters get complicated when politics enters the room. So is the case in the world of Panchayat, in which, over the course of two seasons, emotions have run deep but lives have been led simply. In Season 3, the much-loved Prime Video show extends its narrative, but, in the process, does away with some of its inherent naivete.

Which is both a good and a bad thing. In its third outing, creator The Viral Factory (TVF) takes an ambitious route, going beyond the daily quirks in the lives of its players and focusing on strife both within and outside, with the village of Phulera functioning as a microcosm of the world. The storytelling is more inclusive and the side players shine, giving us a season which is more broad-based in almost every department.

The flipside to that is that Panchayat is no longer about Abhishek Tripathy aka Sachivji (Jitendra Kumar aka Jeetu), a character that viewers have remained invested in from the start. Neither is it as much about the smaller moments between its principal players that made the show such a heartwarming watch in its previous seasons. Granted that every narrative needs to evolve but in its attempt to pole-vault into bigger territory, Panchayat suffers a loss of innocence.

Which left me with a bit of a lump in my throat. That is possibly because of what Panchayat, especially its first season, has meant to me (and I am sure to many others). Dropping in the early stages of the lockdown — the first week of April 2020, to be precise — brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, Panchayat provided both comfort and distraction. The pandemic showed us what life felt like if we stepped off the treadmill and it is the #slowlife that Panchayat embodied, focusing on real people, relatable emotions and characters that were written compellingly enough to draw out laughs as well as tease a tear or more. Even as we went about baking our banana bread and whisking our Dalgona coffee, Panchayat, and its characters, carved an indelible place in our hearts.

Whether it was Sachivji resenting life in a village and gradually growing to love it, Pradhanji (Raghubir Yadav), who ironically, wasn’t even the Pradhan, his straight-talking wife (Neena Gupta) who was, in actuality, the head of the village, and the quirky pair of Prahlad (Faisal Malik) and Vikas (Chandan Roy) all made Panchayat a clutter-breaker in the overcrowded OTT space.

To some extent, Season 3 takes forward that template. But now, the quirky exchanges are lesser, the familiar beer ‘parties’ in the middle of the field are almost absent and Jeetu’s trademark death stare eye-rolls don’t have much place in the narrative. In short, Panchayat has grown up. And that is not something we really like.

For one, the action shifts to the ongoing feud between Pradhan, along with his trusted aides, and corrupt MLA Chandra Kishore (played by Pankaj Jha), who had locked horns at the end of the second season. The hostility has only grown and fanning it is Phulera’s resident ‘Banrakas’ (Bhushan, played by Durgesh Kumar) who wants to wrest power even as Chandra Kishore — whose stint in jail is laughably tinged by an urban legend — seeks revenge.

Politics becomes the bedrock on which Season 3 rests, with the character arc of some of its players being sacrificed, or at best, glossed over. The slow-burn romance between Abhishek and Rinkie (Saanvi) continues to remain slow-burn. Some of the feuds that arise in the village and their resolution elicit a feeling of deja vu. The truly heartwarming moments — save for that scene in which Prahlad learns to laugh again — are few and far between.

What the third season does retain is some of the consistently quirky moods and moments that have made Panchayat the winner that it is. Director Deepak Kumar Mishra, aided by a script written by Chandan Kumar, milks humour out of the everyday lives of Phulera’s motley crew. The satire benefits from its overall strong performances (even the side players are top-notch) as it packs its story with motifs — safed kabootar to safed ghoda, the ubiquitous lauki to a piece of bamboo used as a weapon of mass destruction — all of which are effectively placed in the narrative.

The big question: will Panchayat make us return to it in Season 4? Only if plot and players — and not politics — hold centre stage.

Priyanka Roy
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