Mumbai: As TVF Originals head Shreyansh Pandey enters his seventh-floor office in Mumbai’s Fortune Terraces, a team member briefs him on his packed schedule — there’s a meeting with Netflix, actor nominations for upcoming award shows, shows to be planned. With hits like Aspirants in its kitty, TVF, short for The Viral Fever, is one of India’s first content creation companies to have leapfrogged from a popular YouTube channel to an OTT darling.
Today it straddles both worlds with ease. It has 12 million subscribers on its YouTube channel and streaming platforms are clamouring for the very shows they rejected when TVF first started producing content in 2010. From Aspirants and Permanent Roommates on Amazon Prime Video to Kota Factory on Netflix and Gullak on Sony (LIV), TVF has cracked the code for what viewers want. It makes feel-good shows that speak to middle-class India’s dreams like clearing the UPSC and owning a home.
“What TVF did was not just create content that is relatable for the middle class, but even anticipated that gap. I do not think anyone else has been able to do that,” said Amol Parashar, who plays Chitvan in Tripling, another popular TVF offering. The show, about a dysfunctional family, has been lauded as a marvellous piece of cultural criticism.
From the sensitive, supportive partner Mikesh in Permanent Roommates to the three poles-apart siblings in Tripling, and the engineering students in edgy college drama Hostel Daze, there’s something for all age groups.
By 2017, Permanent Roommates, launched in 2014, was the most viewed long-form web series in the world. In 2015, the year it was released, TVF Pitchers made it to IMDb’s coveted top 250 list of TV shows, surpassing The Daily Show, Downton Abbey, and Suits, to rank 92. Over the years, TVF has also nurtured a stable of actors, like Maanvi Gagroo, Naveen Kasturia, Amol Parashar, Shivankit Parihar and Sumeet Vyas, many of whom began their careers as YouTube stars on its shows.
But TVF’s growing pains have been as dramatic as the shows it creates— with sexual allegations against its founder Arunabh Kumar, who had to step down until he was cleared of charges. (He’s now ‘chief experiment officer’ of The Viral Fever Media Labs.) In 2020, there was an exodus of many members of its core team. There were also allegations of misogyny, criticism of skin-deep feminism, and mismanagement of a start-up growing too fast. Its streaming app TVFPlay failed to take off and was quietly buried in 2020. But TVF seems to have weathered these storms.
When we created Aspirants, no OTT wanted to buy it. So, we co-created it with Unacademy and released it online. Soon, everyone wanted to know when the second season would be out, and wanted to acquire it
-Shreyansh Pandey , TVF Originals head
Today, everyone’s more invested in Aspirants‘ lead character Abhilash Sharma (Naveen Kasturia), the newly anointed district magistrate of Rampur, who has to cope with his ex-girlfriend Dhairya (Namita Dubey) marrying his once best friend Guri (Shivankit Parihar).
TVF’s success was built on a decaying TV industry dominated by melodramatic saas-bahu serials. It capitalised on the craving of a new generation of viewers for fresh narratives, which they had so far sought by downloading illegal torrents of popular US shows.
What works are the scripts, say TVF’s actors and producers. As TVF has adapted, expanded, and experimented with different formats, what’s remained the same is the commitment to a good script.
“We still have open narration. It used to be the same a decade ago, when 40 people, including the intern who joined that day, would get to sit in and share their feedback,” said Pandey with a smile. “This is a team sport. And it makes me proud.”
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A tough climb to the top
Plots are nurtured, storylines are tightened, and characters are fleshed out on the ninth floor of Fortune Terraces in Andheri West, Mumbai’s bustling suburb which doubles as a nucleus for the city’s budding filmmakers.
With a ping-pong table, shared workspaces, and a massive whiteboard scrawled with memes and storylines, there’s controlled chaos on the floor— the heart of TVF’s content output. With about 200 employees and associates, it’s buzzing with activity. A large section of the space is also dedicated to the many awards that TVF has acquired over the years.
In a way, the ninth floor mirrors TVF’s startup show, Pitchers, which tapped into the ambitions of young wannabe entrepreneurs who dreamed of unicorns.
In an interview with HuffPost, Kumar said the idea came to him when he visited Bengaluru and saw young people in their 20s discussing business ideas over multiple pitchers of beer in pubs.
“I would see people’s start-up dreams soar when they would start drinking their first mug of beer and die by the time the last pitcher was finished,” he said.
An IIT Kharagpur graduate—who had turned his back on engineering—Kumar picked up the basics of filmmaking when he got a job at Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment and assisted Farah Khan in directing the blockbuster Om Shanti Om (2007).
But when he started pitching his own ideas to television networks, Kumar faced rejection after rejection. He reportedly worked as a waiter briefly in 2011 for a club in Goa to fund his return to Mumbai.
By this time, fed up with naysayers, Kumar launched a YouTube channel at a time when most production houses were oblivious to the potential of a web series.
In 2012, TVF achieved viral success for the first time with Rowdies 9 – Sab Q-tiyapa Hai, its spoof on MTV Roadies. It got 1 lakh views on the first day and 10 lakh within a week.
Just over a decade on, after many hit videos and web series, TVF is setting its sights on the big screen.
Earlier this month, Kumar and Ektaa Kapoor, India’s very own Shonda Rhimes, announced that they would be partnering on three movie projects.
A new ‘template’ for content
TVF foreshadowed the coming of OTTs, and while its shows speak to the Indian middle class, they are still modern and on point.
“We had accidentally created a template for the kind of content you now see,” said Sumeet Vyas, who has not just acted in two of TVF’s originals, but also written the final season of Tripling.
Vyas gave the example of Permanent Roommates, where the characterisations went beyond familiar TV tropes. “The writers wanted to show different forms of male affection, and that showing affection does not make a man any less capable. What stood out for many people in the first season of Permanent Roommates was the kindness in the characters,” he said.
Then there was Tripling. Launched in 2016, the series didn’t play by the rules of typical YouTube content and instead brought a slick, cinematic vibe.
Everyone associated with the show recalls it as the game-changing moment in TVF’s content-making strategy. From outdoor shoots to the production budget, everything was scaled up. It was no longer a bunch of amateurs trying something inside a studio or at a nearby park.
The risk paid off. Tripling amassed not just views in millions, but also became a cult favourite among Indian middle-class youngsters.
“Siblings in Indian cinema or shows are shown in a certain way. They are always together and too nice to each other, or too estranged. None of which felt real,” said Vyas.
Tripling aimed to flip this script with its story about three estranged siblings who take a trip and catch up with each other’s lives.
The show is about being there for each other, instead of being glued together constantly. For some of the audience, it perhaps assuaged the guilt of not always making it to family events. It realistically captured the fast-paced nature of modern lives and schedules.
Much like its signature shows, TVF’s trajectory has been marked with crises and cliffhangers.
For Aspirants, the litmus test of the concept was another show in the TVF incubator — Rabish ki Report. But where this satire had episodes like Board Exams ki Tayari and UPSC ki Tayari, Aspirants took a different route.
“We were sure that we did not want a show about the preparation. We wanted to use the lens of friendship to show the struggles and journey of UPSC,” said Shreyansh Pandey, head of TVF Originals. The second season was one of the most watched shows on Amazon Prime Video the week it was released, raking in 4.2 million views.
Then there is Gullak, a story about the middle-class Mishra family as they navigate life in a nondescript Uttar Pradesh town. Pandey said this show is also “about all the conversations that I did not manage to have with my parents or the time I could not spend with my sister”. He wanted there to be an “emotional point of watching the show” and for it to spark “conversations again with people we no longer talk to.”
Like Kumar, Pandey is a former IITian. After his BTech in mining and mineral engineering from IIT Varanasi, he worked as a coder at JP Morgan in Mumbai before trying to get his foot in the door of the entertainment industry.
TVF’s basket of offerings includes not just branded content but also mini-series on its sister YouTube channels like Timeliners, Girliyapa, and The Screen Patti (TSP).
Behind the scenes
Deepesh Sumitra Jagdish did not rely on his imagination alone to write Aspirants. Instead, he spent hours talking to exam candidates in Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar and Rajendra Nagar — the twin meccas of UPSC preparation in India. He’d also walk with teachers to their classes to get a sense of the struggles they went through, year after year, teaching hundreds of students after failing to crack the exams themselves.
This process is not unusual. Each TVF show undergoes rigorous research and recce before hitting the production floor. Writers are involved every step of the way.
“People look for writers with an urgency and promptly forget all about them once they get the story. That has been the truth of the industry. There was no system to have a consistent, 50-year-old career for writers. We had this kind of an ecosystem in mind while building TVF,” Pandey said.
Many TVF shows get a boost in their authenticity from the creators’ own experiences. Vaibhav Bundhoo, director of the second season of Pitchers, experienced failure and struggle firsthand, similar to the show’s protagonists. Before he joined TVF he was studying directing at RAI University when it shut down, leaving his future in the balance. Since then, he has worn many hats for TVF—director of photography, composer, songwriter, and singer before his directorial debut with Pitchers.
Similarly, the director of Aspirants, Apoorv Singh Karki, was a former UPSC aspirant who could not crack the exam.
While Karki helmed the direction, Deepesh ensured that the characters in both seasons represented the diversity of UPSC aspirants. Protagonists from Haryana to Kerala to Arunachal Pradesh are part of the show. But they are not typecast.
I did not want to show that extremely honest officer who would even return Rs 2 to a poor shopkeeper. Abhilash had to be more real, rounded, and make difficult choices
Deepesh Sumitra Jagdish, writer, Aspirants
For the character of aspirant Sandeep Bhaiya, a Haryanvi, Deepesh said he was inspired by two senior men he had met in real life, both sensitive, grounded, and fond of reading philosophy. He also made a conscious choice to avoid portraying IAS officers as epitomes of unshakeable honesty and pedestalised behaviour.
“I did not want to show that extremely honest officer who would even return Rs 2 to a poor shopkeeper. Abhilash had to be more real, rounded, and make difficult choices,” said Deepesh.
District magistrate Abhilash’s character is played by Naveen Kasturia, who has been part of TVF since almost its inception, graduating from acting in sketches to meaty roles in Pitchers and Aspirants.
In the case of the latter, his acting was appreciated, but not always his character. While fans rallied around Sandeep Bhaiya (Sunny Hinduja), his mentor in the show, they took umbrage at Abhilash’s selfish streak, his single-minded focus on the exam, his conflicts with his friends, and his break-up with his girlfriend. Kasturia ended up bearing the brunt of it.
“I got a lot of hate in my DMs. People were like, we won’t tolerate it if Abhilash clears the UPSC and Sandeep Bhaiya does not,” said Kasturia. But he appreciates Abhilash’s shades of grey. “We have all left behind someone in our quest to fulfill our dreams. I do not judge Abhilash for it. I like Javier Bardem’s statement about it— actors are the lawyers of the characters they play,” he said.
Kasturia is sanguine about the backlash— it means people are invested in the show. So much so that TVF has created two spinoffs— Sandeep Bhaiya and SK Sir ki Class for their YouTube channel.
“When we created Aspirants, no OTT wanted to buy it. So, we co-created it with Unacademy and released it online. Soon, everyone wanted to know when the second season would be out, and wanted to acquire it,” said Pandey.
TVF also cultivated a talented pool of actors who could pull off relatable, middle-class, ‘aspirational’ roles with elan. Sumeet Vyas’s portrayal of Mikesh Chaudhary in Permanent Roommates was a breakthrough. He recalled how viewers flocked to watch the last and longest episode of season 1. “We had released the fourth episode at night, and by the morning it had amassed a massive number of views,” said Vyas, who is now playing the practical, no-nonsense sibling Chandan in Tripling.
Maanvi Gagroo, who won this year’s Filmfare OTT award for best actress in a comedy series for Tripling, has also played Shreya in Pitchers.
She recalled the moment she got the role of Chanchal in Tripling. “Arunabh and I were on a bus on our way back from a Pitchers promotion in Jaipur when he told me about the idea. I wanted to play the sister almost immediately,” she said. “I remember Arunabh telling me that despite limited scenes, my character will be a hit. I owe a lot of my career to TVF. I wasn’t getting anywhere and the kind of roles I wanted.”
TVF ecosystem
TVF’s basket of offerings includes not just branded content but also mini-series on its sister YouTube channels like Timeliners, Girliyapa, and The Screen Patti (TSP).
Timeliners is positioned as a ‘millennial-focused lifestyle channel’, Girliyapa is branded as specialising in ‘woman-centric entertainment, and TSP is all about humour with a desi ‘tadka’,
Each has its following, with Girliyapa’s October 2023 release, Arranged Couple, featuring Harman Singha and Srishti Srivastava, garnering over a million views for each of its three episodes.
A common thread across TVF and its sister channels is the success of shows specifically targeted at Gen Z and younger millennials, including hits like College Romance, Hostel Daze, and Kota Factory.
Himali Shah, an associate director for College Romance, emphasised the central role of zeitgeist and environment in appealing to target audiences.
“We wanted to have a show in college, and wanted to showcase Delhi. That is how College Romance came about. College life is not incidental, but a major part of the characters’ lives,” she said.
Shah has also directed the mini-series Who’s Your Gynaec? Starring Saba Azad, it explores the lack of sex education in India, and how going to a gynaecologist often becomes a free lesson in misogynistic, patriarchal attitudes.
“Before we did the show, we asked the women working in our own office about their gynaec visits, and we realised that even the most privileged hesitate to make the trip for fear of judgment,” Shah said.
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Cinematic battles
Much like its signature shows, TVF’s trajectory has been marked with crises and cliffhangers.
In 2017, an anonymous woman accused founder Arunabh Kumar of sexual harassment in a post on Medium. Describing herself as a former employee, she detailed multiple instances of harassment during her two-year stint with the company.
The allegations soon prompted others to come forward, leading the Andheri police to register a case against Kumar under Indian Penal Code Sections 354 A (sexual harassment) and 509 (word, gesture, or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman).
The controversy forced Kumar to resign as the CEO, and Dhawan Gusain took over the reins.
More turmoil followed in 2020 when several original TVF members, including creative head Sameer Saxena, Biswapati Sarkar, Nidhi Bisht, Amit Golani, Dhawal Gusain, Karan Chaudhry, and Saurabh Khanna, walked out over reported differences in the business approach. Over a dozen projects were still in production, including the second seasons of Panchayat and Kota Factory, raising questions about their fate.
Saxena and Sarkar formed their own enterprise, Posham Pa Pictures, which created the survival drama Kaala Pani for Netflix this year.
However, akin to the embattled but ultimately triumphant protagonists in its shows, the worst now seems to be behind TVF. In 2022, a court acquitted Kumar of all charges, citing “unexplained and unreasonable” delay in filing the First Information Report.
Soon thereafter, he returned to TVF as a mentor and executive director and reprised his role as Yogi in Pitchers season 2 this year, which amassed 3.1 million views in the week of its release on Zee5.
TVF is not keen to dwell on controversies. “It has been 7 years in the past. We have no comments,” said the official statement.
Now, it’s all about making shows that not only win views and awards but also ensure TVF’s reign in the realm of middle-class content — where the next frontier to conquer is Bollywood.
(Edited by Anjali Thomas and Asavari Singh)