With Panchayat going downhill, you’d think Gram Chikitsalay would be looking to forge its own identity after acting like a stalker in its first season. But the essence of “TVF Rural Universe” goes beyond the template of an idealistic urban character arriving to work in a ramshackle village full of idiosyncratic residents, aggressively colourful dialects, mundane conflicts and backward mindsets. The shared formula is more of an excuse to make the same series twice over. It’s a bit like watching a famous South Indian director making his Bollywood debut by remaking — or culturally adapting — his biggest hit. The remake always looks more rehearsed, functional, designed, and bereft of spontaneity.
Season 2 of Gram Chikitsalay even includes a crossover of two beloved (but annoying) Panchayat characters, as if to remind us that Uttar Pradesh’s Phulera and Jharkhand’s Bhatkandi are actually two different villages. (Any coincidence is purely coincidental). In theory, the idea of invisibilised sections of society having their own franchise is neat. If superheroes and spies can, why not the real India? The reason they don’t feel like separate shows and settings is because the system flattens the personality of the struggle. One grassroots problem resembles another; even a Cinematic Universe can’t afford to be cinematic in such circumstances. But the commodification of village life is hard to unsee in the last few seasons of Panchayat and, now, Gram Chikitsalay. It’s the same with small-town family life in Gullak and student life in Kota Factory and Aspirants. The characters here seem straight out of Asterix-coded comic-books; they’re only allowed to exist if they are suitably quirky, unique or dramatic. Only the urban protagonists are allowed to sound straightforward and ‘normal’.
That man here is Amol Parashar’s Dr. Prabhat Sinha, a well-meaning heir to a city-hospital empire who chooses to take over a Primary Health Centre (PHC) in the middle of nowhere. His concept of bringing change is derived from movies and textbook privilege. He spends the first season being schooled by the locals for being rigid. He must learn to understand the people and meet them half-way instead of lecturing them like an Ayushmann Khurrana hero seeking social change. He cannot solve anything, not unlike MBA hopeful Abhishek Tripathi in Panchayat. But Season 2 features our perennially youthful medical officer leaning into the urban-saviour stereotype in a place that turns class rage into a punchline.
In a broken healthcare system, Prabhat sets his sights on winning the district Adarsh Chikitsalay so that his PHC stops running out of medicines and supplies. In the process, he ends up judging his surroundings and rescuing quite a few people from themselves. One of them is his new friend and fellow MO Gargi (Akansha Ranjan Kapoor), whose networking and first-bencher mentality he starts to resent. It’s a potentially solid track, but the writing inherently sides with Prabhat and his bitterness even when she has a point about his superiority complex. His ward-boy, Gobind (Akash Makhija, now of Raakh fame), has the more interesting arc. In his desperation to make his post permanent, simpleton Gobind accepts a barter offer from a corrupt chief that draws out themes of entrenched patriarchy, the stigma of a ‘defective’ girl who gets rejected as damaged goods, and the general disdain towards science. I like that the change is incremental; nobody is cured overnight, but some light is seen. Prabhat’s rival, the local quack (Vinay Pathak), is treated as more of a sidenote this time. He enlists the help of a has-been politician and some goons who behave like they’re parodying goons, but his presence rarely registers in a show that does not know what to do with him. His shtick is that he’s a fraud who preys on the blind faith of the villagers, but chooses to educate his daughter at a medical college so that she isn’t disrespected like her father. Prabhat is too busy playing a reverse-Munna Bhai M.B.B.S hero: someone who strives to win over the skeptics with competence, common sense and merit rather than ‘love’ and rustic compassion. He’s the killjoy who keeps scolding his compounder, cleaner and ward-boy: the no-nonsense mind trapped in an arid landscape of hearts.
Amol Parashar continues to be watchable as the pensive Mokobara-wearing burbie. He’s the right misfit in a narrative that’s wired to give him the token heroic-baby-delivery moment or two. But the film-making has a country-bumpkin approach to the supporting cast that prevents them from achieving a Panchayat-like familiarity. Actors like Raghubir Yadav, Neena Gupta and the rest do well to obscure the makers’ lopsided gaze in the flagship show, but there’s no escape in the algorithmic feel-goodness of Gram Chikitsalay. It has a handful of decent moments, most of which feature the light-eyed Gobind striving for a better future and destigmatising the language of compromise.
At some level, Season 2 learns from the tonal unevenness and derivative colours of the first season. It’s slightly better, but still suffers from the sort of nothingness-fatigue that plagues several TVF shows once they realise they have fans and a legacy to live up to. Many of the highs and lows have that been-there-seen-that vibe to them; what’s strange is that it’s exactly what the makers seem to be going for. Given that nostalgia was the entry point for this platform and its early franchises, perhaps the only way to consume Gram Chikitsalay — and whatever follows in the not-at-all-condescendingly-named Village Cinematic Universe — is to see it as an inferior throwback to Panchayat. The good old (Malgudi) days, the everyday squabbles, the outsider as an audience surrogate, the cutesy rifts. It’s no longer about an India that doesn’t exist, it’s about a TVF that used to.