A new series titled Gormint was announced by Amazon Prime Video India as a part of its 2020 line up on January 19, 2020.
Among the numerous new series that were announced, Pataal Lok, Bandish Bandits, and The Forgotten Army – Azaadi Ke Liye have already been released.
You can catch a glimpse of the dashing Manav Kaul in his element from Gormint at 1:31 here:
The seed of the show’s title germinated from a video of a Pakistani lady that went viral back in July 2016. With a lot of swearing, the lady in question is berating the government on being asked by a reporter about the persistent power cuts in the area where she resides.
That old lady in her vitriol says ‘Bik Gayi Hai Gormint’ which translates to the government being sold out. It resulted in a lot of memes and gifs back then, which are still available on a number of social media platforms.
AIB announced in December 2016 that they will be creating a political satire show for Amazon, which will star Irrfan Khan as the protagonist. Then titled ‘Ministry’, it was to be AIB’s first fictional web series.
On May 17, 2017, AIB released a video on their official YouTube channel titled ‘Dank Irrfan’, where Irrfan Khan parodied the ‘Gormint aunty’. This was two days before Khan’s latest film, Hindi Medium was released. You can see the late actor’s aunty impersonation at 4:19 here:
In the 2018 India Today Conclave held in March, there was a discussion on the web series by AIB members Tanmay Bhat and Rohan Joshi that they were still in the process of developing the web series which would be about a jaded movie star who unwittingly became a part of the Cabinet.
In attendance were Tim Leslie, then Vice-President of Amazon Prime Video International and James Farrell, then Head of Content, Asia Pacific, Amazon Studios & Prime Video.
But since then, Gormint has been facing one hurdle after another. First, Khan opted out of the web series sometime in mid-August due to concerns over his deteriorating health and his then-upcoming treatment.
It was followed by the surge of the #MeToo Movement in India, where the writer of the web series – Gursimran Khamba – was accused by a woman of misconduct. This led to Khamba, who is also the co-founder of AIB, being removed from the team of Gormint.
Subsequently, Arshad Warsi’s name started doing the rounds as a replacement for Khan in late 2018. News also started coming in then about Girish Kulkarni and Shikha Talsania also being a part of the project.
The entire project got shelved for an unspecified time period. For about a year, even AIB’s YouTube channel didn’t see any updates until the last quarter of 2019.
In January 2020, it was finally confirmed that Manav Kaul would be the protagonist of Gormint. But there hasn’t been any date announcements yet from Amazon regarding the web series.
Will Gormint see the light of day before the end of this year?
Also read: Bhumi Pednekar’s Durgavati to release on Prime Video: Reports