Taking the OTT world by storm again with Jaideep Ahlawat-starrer Paatal Lok 2, creator Sudip Sharma rues how the industry settles for mediocrity in the race for eyeballs
Jaideep Ahlawat reprises his role of Hathi Ram Chaudhary in Paatal Lok 2; (inset) creator Sudip Sharma
When is the next season coming out? Creator Sudip Sharma often heard this question after the raging success of Paatal Lok in 2020. He admits it left him a tad frustrated. “Filmmaking is a long, tedious process. While we were editing the first season, we started working on the second. But it took a while to put everything in place,” he starts. It may have been a long wait of nearly five years, but it has been worth it. The second season of the Jaideep Ahlawat and Ishwak Singh-led crime thriller has opened to glowing reviews.
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For that, much credit goes to Sharma. When Prime Video had approached him to make another instalment, he was certain about one thing—he’d set it in a world far removed from that of the first, which had Delhi-NCR as its backdrop. “I didn’t want to get bored of doing the same thing. It takes so long to make a season that boredom can be a problem. So, I thought of going to a place that looks nothing like the first season,” recalls Sharma. That took him to Nagaland as he told the story of Ahlawat’s character investigating the brutal murder of a Naga leader. The creator had another reason to set the noir thriller in the North-eastern state. “I grew up in the North-east. Although it was unfamiliar territory for Hathi Ram and the show, it wasn’t that unfamiliar to me,” he smiles.
Sudip Sharma
Both of Sharma’s works, Paatal Lok and Kohrra (2023), stand among the finest long-format stories in Indian OTT entertainment. But such series are few and far in between. Does he feel the streaming space in India has hit stagnation? “I do. When OTT started, the buoyancy and optimism that we had about taking our storytelling to another dimension has subsided now. As an industry, we settle for mediocrity easily. I wish we could work a little harder. I’d take an honourable failure for any of my work, but mediocrity dampens the spirit.”
Sharma, whose last theatrical offering was Laal Kaptaan (2019) of which he wrote the dialogues, says he doesn’t understand big-screen releases. So, when we mention that Anurag Kashyap said that the joy of filmmaking has faded away in the Hindi film industry because the emphasis is on marketing, the creator cuts in, “That’s why I’m not making theatricals. We live in the time of information overdose. Everyone is on their phones. Filmmakers, content creators, and TikTokers are the same today—we are all vying for eyeballs and the attention economy. I don’t understand theatrical space right now, be it franchises or how to sell films.”
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