Ahead of The Night Manager’s première in February, people assumed that the team would feel pressured about the inevitable comparisons with the popular British original of the same name. But creator-director Sandeep Modi had different concerns. The team of the Disney+ Hotstar series had decided to split the Anil Kapoor, Aditya Roy Kapur and Sobhita Dhulipala-starrer into two parts, with the second instalment dropping online months after the première. “Will people have emotional memory of the show? That was my first question,” recounts Modi. 

His second doubt was whether the Indian audience was ready to consume a series at a slow pace, in contrast to the bingeing fashion synonymous with OTT. “Some stories need to be seen in a certain way. This is the story of a man, who has seen the death of a little girl and has succumbed to his powerlessness. He wants to take on the powerful, but that [transition] would require some time to be felt. [Initially], I tried to watch the show in entirety. But after some time, I felt I needed a break to savour it. So, I recommended that we do a weekly episode. The team said that the model wasn’t suitable, and they wanted to split it. I wanted to take the risk and see what happens if I don’t allow the audience to binge it,” he explains.