‘Freedom at Midnight’ Sets Stage for Season 2 at SonyLIV (EXCLUSIVE)

Sony’s streaming platform SonyLIV has found success with “Freedom at Midnight,” its adaptation of Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s 1975 non-fiction book about India’s independence, with plans for a second season already in motion.

The seven-episode first season ends on a cliffhanger, with showrunner Nikkhil Advani confirming that Season 2 will tackle the refugee crisis that followed India’s partition. “Twenty to thirty million people are going to be uprooted from their homes,” Advani tells Variety. “What Gandhi had predicted was going to happen. Everybody felt that partition was going to be the answer to quell the violence and to stop it. Mahatma Gandhi said it is only going to become worse.”

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Advani was in Goa to participate in the recently concluded market Film Bazaar, which was part of the ongoing International Film Festival of India (IFFI). He was in a panel discussion organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry hosted on a yacht from the Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association.

The second season is expected to launch in 2025, according to Danish Khan, executive VP and business head of SonyLIV and StudioNext. For Sony, adapting “Freedom at Midnight” aligned with their strategy of telling Indian stories. “We will tell stories of India in a very authentic, cerebral way,” says Khan. “There is a set of people who are our subscribers who appreciate highly researched, authenticated work.”

One of the primary challenges in adapting the book was condensing decades of context into the series’ timeframe. “The events between August 16, 1946, when [Muhammad Ali] Jinnah chose to give the Direct Action Day speech, and January 30, 1940 – these events are indisputable,” says Advani. “It’s almost like a roller coaster.”

SonyLIV head of content Saugata Mukherjee adds, “The biggest challenge was how do you adapt a 1000-page book (that too a non-fiction book at that) without losing the essence of it. And manage to make it enjoyable for a large swathe of audience who may or may not be lovers of history.”

The series has been dubbed in Hindi, Malayalam and Telugu to reach a wider audience within India. “The idea is that this story should travel,” says Khan.