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'The Hunt' and 'Panchayat' to 'The Traitors': Is Indian Streaming in its Copy-Paste Era?
'Panchayat' spawns clones; 'The Hunt' reclaims history — OTT’s contradictions define its current identity.
The last few months have captured the entire gamut of the Indian streaming ecosystem, with every ‘type’ of show been released on OTT platforms. There are commercial remakes of popular Western fiction: Season 2 of Raina Naidu on Netflix (based on Ray Donovan), and Mistry on JioHotstar (based on Monk). There are cheesy international reality-show franchises: Season 1 of The Traitors India concluded on Prime Video following successful American and Dutch editions. There are the homegrown IPs: Season 4 of TVF’s flagship series, Panchayat, on Prime Video. There are homegrown action-espionage vehicles: Season 2 of Neeraj Pandey’s hit series, Special Ops, on JioHotstar. And there are docudrama-coded period adaptations: Nagesh Kukunoor’s The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case on SonyLIV, based on reporter Anirudhya Mitra’s investigative book Ninety Days (2022).
It’s worth having a closer look at two of these titles to understand the contradictions of OTT entertainment in recent times. In terms of artistic hierarchy, we often perceive originals as a rung higher than official remakes and translations — particularly in a risk-averse era of passive and algorithm-driven ‘content’. But the relentless franchising of something original, over multiple seasons, tends to become an adaptation of itself. At some level, the endgame is the same.
Between Season 3 (2024) and Season 4 of Panchayat, at least two Panchayat-coded shows came to the fore: Dupahiya (a rural dramedy centered on a stolen bike) and Gram Chikitsalay (a rural dramedy revolving around a government doctor struggling to win over a village). The setting and universes are uncanny, perhaps the OTT version of Bollywood doubling down on horror comedies after the success of Stree (2018). As a result, the genre fatigue of the originally conceived TVF universe — the first movers in the space — felt pronounced in Season 4. Panchayat itself has started to feel one of the many imitations of Panchayat. It’s still a very watchable series, but the strengths of the first two seasons — the Malgudi Days-style ‘stretching’ of moments, the everydayness of a fictional village — have lost their sheen. It’s like going back to your favourite people, but also getting a bit bored of them at times.
The Hunt: The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case takes something overfamiliar and presents it in a new language: no sensationalisation, no manipulation of facts, just a clinical representation of history the way we rarely imagine it. It resists the temptation of creative licenses and agenda-fuelled lore, following the trials and tribulations of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) in charge of one of the most famous manhunts in post-independent India. The chase of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) operatives and their mastermind across the country in 1991 acquires the urgency of a more contemporary mission: the SIT find themselves battling invisible “orders from above,” political string-pulling, bureaucracy and media pressure.
Kukunoor’s filmmaking sticks to the basics; there’s a journalistic rigour about how each member is less of a ‘character’ and more of a flawed truth-seeker. It trusts that life itself has enough excesses and conspiracy theories embedded within, it’s just a matter of recognising them. One is pleasantly surprised to see a crime thriller acknowledge the mundaneness and frustrations of pre-technology cases. Every character has a strong personality, but there is very little moral judgment in the way they’re staged. To understand how rare this is for a pan-Indian story, one just needs to look at a majority of the Partition and war-themed mainstream movies released in the last decade. Not taking sides is, at the moment, braver than taking one.
Regardless of the reception that contrasting titles like Panchayat and The Hunt invite, however, they continue to platform some of the finest acting talent around. It’s an alternate and necessary model of sorts, where ensemble casts of performers that are otherwise relegated to the margins of commercial cinema define the storytelling here. Take Ashok Pathak’s Binod in Season 4 of Panchayat; there’s an arc that is now known as the “Binod episode,” where Pathak’s turn humanises the role of a petty goon who surprises the protagonists by staying faithful to his boss. After the emergence of Chandan Roy and Faisal Malik in the last few seasons, it’s Pathak — he recently stood out as Radhika Apte’s husband in the delightfully absurdist Sister Midnight (2024) — who throws his hat in the ring.
Sahil Vaid delivers the scene-stealing performance of The Hunt, as a Tamil-speaking North Indian officer who’s a little more emotional and passionate than his SIT colleagues. Vaid is a passing presence in commercial Hindi fare, but he effortlessly plays the only one with an opinion — a primary character that might have resorted to jingoism and bigotry in a lesser series. With newer seasons of similarly themed shows like The Family Man around the corner, it’s important for this chamber to thrive for the voices it keeps introducing and reintroducing. It applies across the board: from feature-film directors like Raj & DK and Kukunoor who enjoy second winds in streaming, to those like Pathak and Vaid who find the validation they’ve always deserved. At this point, the big screen can only play catch up. It’s the small screen that sustains an industry full of untapped potential.
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