'Panchayat' review: Bottle gourds, comedy and believable drama fill this backwater tale with life

Director: Deepak Kumar Mishra

Cast: Jitendra Kumar, Raghuvir Yadav, Neena Gupta

Score: 3.5

Ah, life. Such a troublesome tale. One moment you're enjoying life in the city, and the next you're an officer at the backwater panchayat. Such is the tale of Abhishek Tripathi, a city-grown boy with a sharp mind but cursed with a supposedly mediocre job.

But life in the backwaters can have its own charm, as Amazon's Panchayat, directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra, shows very eloquently.

Abhishek's life in the backwater village of Phulera starts off rather spectacularly. The village 'pradhan' is not who it should be, the panchayat office cannot be opened and the lock won't be broken because the real 'pradhan' won't stand for it.

From there, the show grows into a look into life in the backwaters. People carry small superstitions, refuse to change their ways, have their own petty tendencies and carry little grudges.

Abhishek is thrust into this little village, content in its own pace and way of life, and painfully learns that the only way to get out of the mess is the tried-and-tested competitive exam CAT.
But on the other hand, the village has its charm, and Abhishek slowly learns that he really just has to look to find fun in the smaller things in life.

To start off, Panchayat has excellent production value and direction. From the beginning to the end, Deepak Kumar Mishra remains in total control and it shows in just how efficiently everything is produced.

The comedy has great timing, the melancholy hits you just right and even the serious drama gets its time to shine without overpowering the other elements. By and far, all the parts that make up Panchayat work in great harmony, building off what came before and ending ever so slightly higher, leaving you with a bit of a smile and a smirk at the close of each episode, and with just enough anticipation to jump into the next one.

Complementing the excellent direction is music that fits perfectly into the kind of life our characters find themselves in. It is a little jovial, a little sad, a little dramatic and mixed with enough oomph for some quick taps as you listen to it.

The acting is the real icing here, however. All the characters have their own little growth bubbles, and they bring in enough of their past experience into it.

Be it Jitendra Kumar's jittery, irritated Abhishek who just wants to drop everything and run, to Raghuvir Yadav's sporadic leadership in Brij Bhushan Dubey, and even Neena Gupta , who remains a treat to watch on screen to this day, has a very proactive role to play as Manju Devi; a woman who is bold enough to talk back to even people above her, but with enough understanding of her own limitations to ask for help.

To conclude, Panchayat has enough of everything that makes a good show. The story, direction, acting and music are all wonderful to behold and at the close, the series leaves a bit of a desire to rewatch it.