Nikkhil Advani Talks ‘Freedom At Midnight’ Season 2 & Aaron Sorkin’s Influence After Telling Story Of Indian Independence

Jesse Whittock
·5-min read

The team behind SonyLIV drama Freedom at Midnight are moving the Indian Independence story on for its second season following a strong response to Season 1.

The story, directed and showrun by Nikkhil Advani, is set to go from the tense negotiations around of the Indian Partition of 1947 to the refugee crisis that followed the borders being redrawn, with Season 1 ending on a cliffhanger after launching this month and setting the scene for the second.

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“The basic objective for now to ensure that this show travels as much as it can,” said Danish Khan, Executive VP and Business Head at SonyLIV and its in-house production arm, StudioNext. “Obviously, that brings larger subscriptions and bigger business. If we can do that, Season 2 will even become bigger.”

Season 2 will comprise eight episodes and likely roll out next year. Khan said anticipation for the second run was building, but that “as a first step, we have got the thumbs up for the show. Nikkhil has done the job. Now it is for the SonyLiv team to take this story forward to different geographies and across India.”

For SonyLIV, that has meant dubbing the Hindi-language drama in Malayalam and Telugu, and offering overdubbed versions that replace English-speaking roles with Indian languages. Central to the story is the talks between the retreating British Empire and various religious groups with differing views of India’s future. In Season 1, the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Lord Louis Mountbatten and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, and Cyril Radcliffe are play significant roles. Andrew Cullum plays Attlee, Luke McGibney and Cordelia Bugeja will play the Mountbattens, the last Viceroy and Vicereine of India, respectively, Alistair Finlay plays Commander-in-Chief Archibald Wavel and Richard Teverson portrays Cyril Radcliffe, the chairman of the Boundary Commission for the Partition of India.

Leading the cast are Sidhant Gupta as Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, Chirag Vohra as Mahatma Gandhi and Rajendra Chawla as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the first deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister of India.

Reviews of the series have largely been good, with praise given for the performances and the extreme attention to detail Advani and his team paid to the source material, the 1975 non-fiction book from Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre.

“This is a huge production requires imagination, because we are not one of those platforms that have huge budgets,” said Khan. “We operate at a decent budget, but not a high one, so you need person who can visualize such a large canvas story in a budget which really works for us and for the business. That requires a certain amount of very intelligent imagination.

Advani told Deadline how he had demanded his acting team only work on Freedom at Midnight during the production. “It’s not about just surrendering yourself to the role. It’s just that I didn’t want my Nehru, my Gandhi and my Patel to be playing some love interest in some rom-com,” he said. “I took advantage of that the entertainment industry in India has finally understood the need to concentrate on one project at a time.”

Advani’s Emmay Entertainment produced the show in association with StudioNext, marking the latest co-production between the production house and SonyLIV. They first worked together on another series based an historical moment in India’s past, exploring how the country’s nuclear program developed after independence was achieved in the late 1940s. “We never thought of anyone else except Nikkhil,” said Khan, recalling how he had approached the director after acquiring rights to the book. “We asked if he would like to do it and he said, ‘This is my favorite book.’ That’s where we started.”

Advani noted that the pacing of the scripts was influenced by The West Wing, Moneyball and The Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. “I’m a very big fan of Aaron Sorkin,” he said. “He simplifies very complicated subjects,” he said. “As an Indian sitting in Mumbai, and with no desire to know about baseball, I will watch Moneyball and I can’t stop watching it.”

Freedom at Midnight is certainly SonyLIV’s biggest original to date, forming part of an upcoming slate that also includes Applause Entertainment’s second season of Tanaav, in-house production Shark Tank India, Endemol Shine India’s MasterChef India, Sudhir Mishra’s Summer of 77, Ram Madhvani’s Waking of a Nation and Goldy Bahl’s Civil Lines.

Khan noted SonyLIV has rolled out in 105 countries over the past two years, including full distribution in the U.S. and UK. A big marketing campaign will run between April-June next year, and acquisitions such as exclusivity for the Asia Cup have bolstered the offer. With Disney and Reliance merging and bringing their streamers into the same group, that early mover strategy hands SonyLIV the opposrtunity, at least, to carve out its piece of the emerging market.

“We started telling original stories a few years back with the launch of Scam 1992, which was a major,runaway success,” said Khan. “Thereafter, the focus has been to tell unique Indian stories for Indian people and people interested in Indian stories. So far, Freedom at Midnight has been the largest, biggest Indian story that we could tell, because it is relevant to every single person who is interested in India.

“The fact that it has got a very, very encouraging response will help us build this platform. The media in India is going through a phase of consolidation.” This posed a challenge, he admitted, but added, “On other side, the good content always finds a headline somewhere.”

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