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When the Microsoft outage brought the world to a standstill, actor-director Deven Bhojani became the centre of meme attention across the country. His character Dushyant from Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai, who was a tech lover, and his tagline ‘I’ll explain it to you’, became the subject of memes and even he thoroughly enjoyed them. “I feel really good about it, as an actor and as a director too, because all my characters have become very popular, including Dushyant,” he says.
Bhojani claims that a lot of people still don’t know that he also directed the comedy, apart from being a part of it. “I want the audience to know that in the show they love so much, I not only acted in it but also created it,” he says, adding that this isn’t the first time he’s seen Dushyant memes taking over the internet. “After Oppenheimer (2023), people had created memes saying, ‘Only Dushyant can play the film that Nolan conceived. ’ Also, after the budget announcement, memes of ‘Only Dushyant can explain Nirmala Sitharamam’s budget to the audience’ emerged,” he shares.
Now that the show is back in the news, do you think a third season of Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai should be made? “After the first season, people had been asking for a second season, and I, along with producers JD Majethia and Aatish Kapadia, were contemplating whether we should do it. When we finally did a second season, we did it successfully, only to an extent and not completely. So, we thought that the bar that we had set for ourselves, becomes difficult to reach again. We have mutually decided that only when we have an idea that we are 110 per cent sure that the audience will love, we will do it,” he replies.
Bhojani admits that the standard of sitcoms has declined over the years and explains why. “Back then we had episodes once or twice a week. So we had enough time to push ourselves as creators and give time to the actors for workshops and rehearsals. We had that kind of luxury. But nowadays, we have daily sitcoms and it is a challenge because there is no time to prepare as there is a deadline. So, the quality also suffers,” he explains, adding that the art of family sitcoms has been lost in recent times. “There are successful weekly sitcoms but they deal with a different kind of humour and have a different set of audience. But if you look at the sitcoms of the 90s and early 2000s, there is no comparison,” he insists.
Though Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai was not a hit at the time of its release, Bhojani reveals that it was not the channel that pulled the plug on the show. “The creative team at the channel was still happy with our show despite the low TRPs, but we decided on our own that we were starting to get repetitive and before it happened any further, we should stop it. So, it was us who approached the channel for a break. The show was way ahead of its time and around the 17th edition of the show, which was five years later, was when people started taking notice of it,” he shares, adding that while he loves both acting and direction, he is now more focused on the former. “Direction has taken a backseat for now, unless I get a great script,” he says.
