Where TVF’s Panchayat is based, in the fictitious UP village of Phulera, lawlessness, casteism, and misogyny are unheard of. The largest issues were a pot-holed road and an occasional power outage, but it made the viewer wish all Indian villages were so tidy and had happy slogans written on the walls.
As he studied for the MBA entrance exam, engineering graduate Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) had come to this rustic paradise to take a low-paying job as the panchayat secretary to gain some experience. Thrown into the outer reaches of village life, he learns friendship, loyalty, and perhaps even love.
In the first two seasons (2020–2022), writer Chandan Kumar and director Deepak Kumar Mishra crafted comedy out of ordinary circumstances.
Manju Devi (Neena Gupta) is the village Pradhan (Chief), a figurehead chosen to the role as a result of women’s reservation in panchayats. As in so many other areas, everyone refers to her spouse Brij Bhushan Dubey (Raghubir Yadav) as Pradhanji and he is the de facto headman. This custom is acknowledged and subtly mocked; there is no condemnation of it. But after two seasons, the illiterate Manju Devi—who had never heard the national anthem—has grown a little more brash. She makes far greater use of her voice and influence in Season 3.
The inner circle of Abhishek nicknamed Sachivji consists of Prahlad Pandey (Faisal Malik), the deputy Pradhan, and Vikas (Chandan Roy), the office assistant. Then there is Rinki (Sanvikaa), the daughter of the Pradhan, with whom Abhishek has a reluctant but discreet flirtation.
Two significant occurrences happened towards the conclusion of the second season: Prahlad’s soldier son was murdered on the battlefield, and Abhishek was moved by the resentful MLA Chandrakishore Singh (Pankaj Jha). It was an unexpectedly sad turn for the typically upbeat series.
From then, Season 3 begins, with a distraught Prahlad lying in a drunken stupor and Abhishek contemplating his future and attempting to evade his new posting to Bhaypura. In the meantime, in a funny first episode, the friends of Ahishek and Pradhan attempt to have his transfer undone by keeping the new hire from starting. When their scheme succeeds, they turn the MLA into an adversary, and this ill will linger through the rest of the episodes.
It somewhat detracts from the charming simplicity of the earlier seasons, when ordinary events—like a haughty groom requesting Abhishek’s expensive office chair or a villager demanding that the recently installed CCTV camera be used to find his missing goat—provided laugh-out-loud comedy.
Before it all turns into political rivalry, there is one such incident in which an elderly woman (Abha Sharma) poses as having been pushed out of her home by her son in order to qualify for a rural housing programme for the destitute.
With the support of the MLA, Bhushan (Durgesh Kumar) and his ambitious wife Kranti Devi (Sunita Rajwar) get the opportunity to launch an attack thanks to this little deceit in which Abhishek and the Dubeys become embroiled. He is raging at Phulera and has his own problems.
The show is still lighthearted and whimsical, but every other show perpetuates the corrupt MLA caricature, and one had thought Panchayat would avoid violence and evil. But how long could Phulera be innocent when the great, scary world was going to crash through the craters in the village road?
The cast of the show is its strength; the major actors have already embraced their roles, but the supporting cast—such as the shrewd elderly woman who wants to defy the system, the bird-seller Bam Bahadur (Amit Kumar Maurya), who is prepared to take on the goons of the MLA, and the conceited groom from the first season (Asif Khan), who pays a visit and completes an important task—adds to the charm. The show is like an antidote to all the nastiness in the real world, and there are enough threads remaining to weave Season 4, perhaps without the black clouds lurking above Phulera.
