The Family Man: Raj & DK on moving action to South India, lack of women crew, and breaking character with Chellam Sir-Entertainment News , Firstpost
‘We need to regroup, clear our heads, and sit and start writing it, so that we’re not too influenced but are still cognizant of what was great and what was not,’ say Raj & DK on Season 3 of their successful espionage show The Family Man.
*Spoilers Ahead*
In the Age of Peak TV, the Curse of the Second Season is real. It has become incredibly hard to follow up a great season with an equally great second season, and that is no different in the Indian OTT space. This was something show creators Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK (Raj and DK) were keenly aware of when they started working on the second season of their spy thriller, The Family Man. “Somebody even sent us a list of second seasons that didn’t work, across the globe. It was a long list,” says Raj, with a laugh.
Having already finished writing Season 2, with their writing collaborators Suman Kumar, Manoj Kumar Kalaivanan, and Suparn Varma when the show debuted in September 2019, the duo had little time for self-doubt. It helped that when they started filming soon after.
Everyone on set was “cautiously confident that this season was looking really good.” “People were saying, ‘This is better than Season 1,’ and they weren’t saying it lightly.
There was a fair amount of confidence going into the release that this would work out,” says DK. It has been a little over a week since the season dropped, and the cast and crew have been basking in the glory of the show’s runaway success.
The second season of The Family Man takes off a year after the events of the first. Srikant Tiwari (the brilliant Manoj Bajpayee) now works in an IT firm where his overbearing and much-younger boss keeps reminding him to not be a ‘minimum guy.’ At home, his marriage to Suchi (Priyamani) is splitting at the seams. And through all this, he desperately misses his days at TASC fighting the bad guys.
On moving the action to South India
From Kashmir in the first season, the action has shifted to Chennai in this one. “Our intention right from the beginning was to tell a story that spans across India. We knew that this season will be set in the South, and the next in another part of the country. Not only had we written this season but also started shooting when the show premiered in 2019. So we stuck to what our original plan was. There were only a few tweaks based on audience reactions like many said that they missed Atharv (Vedant Sinha) in the later episodes of the first season,” adds DK.
On mixing humour with espionage
Raj & DK set the tone in the first season by balancing high-octane action with unrefined charm. Even as the canvas became bigger and the stakes are higher this season, the show continues to be funny. There is a moment where Srikant is questioning his missing daughter’s friends, and one of them mentions her falling out because “Dhriti (Ashlesha Thakur) is a feminazi, and I am a libertarian.” Srikant does not know what either of the words mean, and it is just organically funny. In another, Raji (Samantha Akkineni in a career-defining role) meets her comrades, and teases one of them for having put on weight.
“We never read a scene and think, ‘It’s too dark, let’s put in a joke here.’ What you see is what fits naturally in that moment and, of course, there are also the performances that make it better,” explains Raj. He then adds, “Whether it’s the TASC members or Raji’s team, just because they are on a mission, doesn’t mean that they are mission-faced all the time. They are human, and there’s banter. It’s only natural.”
On The Family Man as a food show
Now that straddling multiple genres has become second nature for the creators, it is important to acknowledge that The Family Man is also a food show. Atharv complains about having dosa for breakfast, Muthu (Ravindra Vijay) explains the right way to eat podi to the TASC team, Bhaskaran (Mime Gopi) cooks Sri Lankan fish curry in his London home and, of course, Sambit (Vipul Sharma) is never far from a cup of tea. “Early in the writing process, we realised that you will have eating moments throughout so then we decided to put in some details like the podi. Or when JK says he loves South Indian food, and Muthu asks him, ‘What South Indian food? There are five states.’”
On breaking character with Chellam Sir
For a show that prides itself on being realistic, Chellam Sir (Udhayabanu Maheshwaran), the super spy, is possibly the most Bollywood thing about this season. And, Raj and DK know it. “Chellam is Suman’s favourite character. From the get-go, he was like, ‘There’s this legendary spy who is like a ghost.’ We thought that in a show like this, where everything has a very solid reason, Chellam would be very filmy. But we deliberately set out to break the mould of our own show a little bit. Though he is a filmy character, he’s treated in a realistic and unassuming manner,” says DK. That the character has gone viral in the last week has surprised everyone. “People are making memes, and UP Police even used his photo in a tweet. It’s all been very unexpected,” adds Raj.
On co-directing for the first time
In what is another departure from the norm for the duo, the creators roped in Suparn Varma to direct five episodes of this season. From the time the two quit their engineering jobs in the US to make films in Bollywood, they have mostly written, directed, and, in the initial years, also produced their work. The tight-knit pair, who met as students in an engineering college in Tirupati, have had other writing partners but have never shared directorial duties. (They co-wrote Stree, which was directed by Amar Kaushik.)
“The world of series is a little different from the movies,” Raj explains, adding, “Every single actor, scene, and decision in the first season was all on us, which is like five times the amount of work that a film takes.” A former journalist, Suparn’s film credits include directing and writing films like Acid Factory and Ek Khiladi Ek Haseena. “It was really about finding a like-minded talented director who’s capable of taking the show forward and enhancing it, while being cognizant of the fact that the show now has a certain tonality. Suparn was perfect,” DK chimes in.
On Samantha Akkineni’s ‘brownface’
Praise for this season of the series has been universal but there has been a smattering of criticism. The filmmakers are keeping abreast of everything that has been said and discussed. “When something fails, you definitely look at what went wrong, and why it didn’t work. And when it succeeds also. Nothing is perfect. There are still going to be niggles,” says DK.
Samantha Akkineni in The Family Man Season 2
Among the ‘niggles’ is the decision to make Raji multiple shades darker than the actress is in real life. While it is understood that the character’s complexion is not beauty-related, and the actor is playing someone from the same race, her brownface does take away from what otherwise is a pitch-perfect performance. The creators believe the usage of the term in this instance is inappropriate. “This is simply a case of an actor getting into a role and looking like it. She plays a soldier who lived in the trenches close to the equator. She doesn’t have the time to take care of her skin or pay attention to her hair,” insists DK. Raj adds, “The idea was to make her (look) unassuming, so that when she comes with full force, the effect is double.”
On why there aren’t many women behind-the-scenes
Like Raji’s character, this season of The Family Man is peppered with really interesting female characters, both new and recurring, be it Dhriti or Prime Minister Basu (Seema Biswas). But there are no women credited in the show’s writing or direction teams. At a time when there is so much talk about representation and inclusion, this matters. “We’ve always had women in our team. In most of the films we’ve done so far, we’ve had Sita Menon writing with us. She was writing something else in parallel, so she couldn’t join this one. Beyond gender, I think it’s so much a part of us that we don’t have to make a conscious effort to be balanced. In this series, my wife and DK’s wife Anu have been creatively contributing so much,” says Raj. A PR lady from Amazon Prime Video India reminds him that the team from the OTT giant headed by Aparna Purohit, “who leads the originals contributed to the writing as well.” “Yeah, the team from Amazon is all women,” he adds.
On future projects
The Family Man is not the only project the filmmakers are doing for the streaming giant. Right before the second wave of the pandemic hit, they were shooting an untitled Amazon Prime Video India show with Shahid Kapoor and Vijay Sethupathi in Goa. There is also the Indian instalment of the Russo Brothers’ ambitious Amazon show Citadel. And then there is Ashwalinga, a web series directed by Rahi Anil Barve of Tumbbad-fame that Raj & DK have produced.
On Season 3
It might be a while before we see the third season of The Family Man starts though. Unlike the second season that was written much before the first went on air, Raj and DK are still developing the story for the third one. “We are behind this time. We have the world in place, we have the concept, we have an idea, and the foundation to some extent. But we’re still developing the story. This time, we’re actually seeing the feedback, and there’s a deluge of it. We need to regroup, clear our heads, and sit and start writing it, so that we’re not too influenced but are still cognizant of what was great and what was not,” says Raj.
The Family Man Season 2 is streaming on Amazon Prime Video India.
(Also read: In The Family Man Season 2, the politics of a family runs parallel to that of a nation)
