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. 

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.