International Binges: Panchayat & Queenie

Are you looking to diversify your TV viewing by watching something a little less American? I recently binged my way through one British show and one Indian show and can highly recommend both depending on whether you're looking for drama, comedy, or a little bit of both.

Queenie: Created by Candice Carty-Williams, based on her novel of the same name, this is a glorious series about Queenie Jenkins (played by the incredible Dionne Brown), a young British-Jamaican woman in London who is currently going through the most hellacious few months of her life. There is no confirmation that the show will be back for a second season, so instead, sit back and let this series of eight perfect episodes wash over you. 

Queenie is a Black woman in London and she doesn't want to see her mother even though she does spend time with her aunt and grandmother. She has a white boyfriend (though that relationship is on the rocks as the series starts), and an incredible group of girlfriends that she enlists for support, mostly via a group chat, when she makes terrible decisions and needs some advice. Which is something that happens ALL THE TIME over the course of these eight episodes.

This is a classic story of a twentysomething grappling with some intense personal trauma whilst also suffering from a quarter-life crisis. She is trying to establish her identity, figure out how many microaggressions she is willing to put up with, and what are the boundaries she needs, without making the mistake of shutting out absolutely everyone in her life. Like all great characters, Queenie is such a unique individual, but her story is universally relatable - we all have those difficult relationships or moments when we just snowball from one terrible choice to another, and it's wondrous to watch this brave woman bare her soul and try to clamber out from underneath the weight of the world. The supporting cast are all incredible, but mostly, you'll just be mesmerized by this central performance from Dionne Brown and root for Queenie to find a way forward with every fiber of your being.

Panchayat: This show is like watching Parks & Recreation but set in a rural Indian village in Uttar Pradesh named Phulera, where a hapless young man named Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) has joined to be the secretary of the panchayat (the village council that serves as the local self-government). He has had to take this job because he didn't do well in his engineering exams, but now he is hoping to leverage this experience to get into a more prestigious master's program and get the hell out of this village.

The first season of this show is definitely the best. We are introduced to the motley cast of characters that make up the panchayat, led by the Pradhan (aka leader), Brij Bhushan Dubey (Raghubir Yadav), who is technically acting on behalf of his wife, Manju Devi (the glorious Neena Gupta), who was elected to the position so that they could say a woman was in charge to meet diversity quotas. The show is a pitch-perfect expose of the pettiness and silliness of local government, but while the characters initially seem extremely incompetent, you gradually learn to fall in love with their foibles and idiosyncrasies.

While I binged the first season in a day or two, I found the second and third seasons to be a bit slower going as things got a little too Bollywood. The genre slipped from pure comedy to a fair amount of drama, but I must say that they absolutely won me over with the final few episodes of Season 3. Writer Chandan Kumar, and director Deepak Kumar Mishra are finding that right tonal balance for a dramedy, and while I do wish they would lean more towards the hilarity of local village shenanigans (with a little romance to boot!) rather than the broader and more brutal world of Indian politics outside the village, they have a deft and wonderful touch that will certainly keep me coming back for future seasons. And special shoutouts to music composer Anurag Saikia, whose soundtrack and score for this show does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of setting the tone, while the lush cinematography by Amitabha Singh and Amit Kulkarni makes this show a true feast for your eyeballs.