Nair and his team don’t want to “let down the cult”, of which he is firmly a member. “But beyond that this [The Office India] is for a newer audience,” he says. Also, no more than five million Indians would have seen the American version, he says. That gives Nair, what he calls, the 100-million gap between Narcos and Naagin, to tap into. “People are watching television differently. We are going into a mass of niches. Each niche is about 30 million in India, and that gives a great opportunity to tell stories,” he says. “The daily soap moved to other languages [beyond Hindi], and that’ll happen here [with premium television content] too.”

The transferability of concepts across mediums is not in doubt. Podcasts are becoming TV shows. Books have always been made into movies. Movies are lending themselves to series. Even TV series are becoming movies (Downton Abbey, coming soon to a theatre near you). A greater proliferation of language and format adaptations, in the age of booming content demand, is not just inevitable. It makes for a clever business strategy.

Unfortunately, “most people don’t get adaptations,” says Nair, who is also the brain behind India’s longest-running big-format adaptation, Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC). Then the CEO of Star TV, Nair had brought Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (of British origin) to Indian television, “never straying from the format to the last detail” but still giving it its own identity. (Many non-fiction shows on Indian television are adaptations: Bigg Boss from Big Brother, Nach Baliye from Dancing with the Stars to name a few.) “I’ve been trying to explain to people for 20 years that you’re paying good money [for the license] to adapt content,” he says, but they still like to consider it “loosely, a rip-off or [at best] inspired by.”

Fiction adaptations, meanwhile, haven’t had as much success in India. Here the story’s universality holds the key, says Nair. Recently, Applause’s Hostages (a remake of the Israeli original) and Criminal Justice (based on HBO’s The Night of) have found audiences. “If the story can travel, you can remake it with Indian actors and settings, so that it reaches more people. How many people will watch an Israeli show, in Hebrew, dubbed into Hindi? We have to tell stories in our context.”

Which has been the attempt with The Office, that has moved from small-town America (Scranton, Pennsylvania) to small-town India (Faridabad, NCR). Everyone’s office has the socio-cultural subtext that made both the American and British versions popular, says Nair. So they gave the show a local relevance and built it up with relatable characters, rather than familiar stars.

Applause Entertainment

We’re a long way from Scranton. And yet, we’re not