iWorld
Official Chukyagiri, returns with Season 2 as Official CEOgiri
MUMBAI: After a fantastic debut, Arré’s hit web series, Official Chukyagiri returns with Season 2. This time, however, the tables have turned, and the plot revolves around the elusive CEO of the office, essayed by India’s leading digital star, Sumeet Vyas.
The heartwarming dramedy, setin the corporate world, first launched in September 2016to universal acclaim. It brought to lifea typical office environment, populated by a motley crew of identifiable characters: the wide-eyed intern, the bullying boss, the cocky IT head, the witty yet endearing Janitor Chacha, and the crazy, complex CEO, who, in the first season,existed only as a tough-talking drone.
This world was presented through the perspective of Spandan Chukya, a hopeful intern from a small town, who has cometo Mumbai like lakhs of similar aspirants hoping to make it in the city of dreams… only to realisethat “Yahaan Jagah Milti Nahin, Banani Padti Hai”.Season 2, however,pivots to anotherperspective; that of the CEO, a.k.a, D, a.k.a, the drone and his worldview of corporate life.
Sumeet Vyas, India’s leading digital star, who was revealed as the CEO in the drone, will take centrestage as the star of Season 2. Joining him will be the original hit cast of Season 1 – Aahana Kumra, Gopal Dutt, Sunny Kaushal, and Anand Tiwari – who will have pivotal roles to play, alongside new characters played by Eisha Chopra and Pranay Manchanda.
This season is presented by Digene,a leading over-the-counter antacid,in association with Dabur Red Gel Toothpaste and Bankbazaar.com, theworld’s first neutral online marketplace for instant customised rate quotes on loans and credit cards. Digene, known for its cooling action and presence in various unique Indian and International flavors and multiple formats (gel, tablet, powder and pudina pearls) is a natural fit to a show centered around the lives of corporate professionals. As a dependable solution to acidity, gas, indigestion and other modern ailments that stem from our lifestyles, eating habits, late working hours, it is integral to the lives of hardworking professionals. The central promise of the brand is organically woven with the setting and script of the series.
Season 1was conferred an Official Honoree at the 21st Annual Webby Awards and is one of the most watchedand loved web series in the country.Viewers have engaged with it on Arré and Arré’s multiple channels on YouTube, Facebook, JioTV, Yupp TV, Jio Cinema, SonyLIV, Ola Play, Vodafone Play etc. This new season will also be available across all these platforms, in line with Arré’s unique platform-agnostic model for original content.
Sumeet Vyas said, “I am looking forward to playing a bigger role in the second season of Official ChukyagiriCEOgirifor Arré. I am particularly excited about playing a character like D – someone who is deeply flawed and emotionally complex but also charming and suave. I look forward to the challenge ahead and can’t wait to see how it all turns out.”
Jaideep Singh, Director, Arré,said,“This is a franchise that we plan to spin into multiple seasons, and you will soon see iterations in regional languages as well. For Season 2 of this well-loved series, we’re delighted to partner with Digene, an iconic brand. It is a perfect fit, considering the show is set in a corporate environment, and forms part and parcel of the characters’lifestyles. With support from our sponsors, ensemble cast, and creative collaborators, we are confident that this season will break new ground and help expand the fast-growing audience base of Arré.”
The show is produced for Arré by Amritpal Singh Bindra and Anand Tiwari of Still and Still Moving Pictures who also produced Season 1. Amritpal Singh Bindra said, “After the roaring success of Season 1, we are very excited to continue our working relationship with Arré and take the show a notch higher. This time, the focus has been to create a plot-driven story with the addition of dynamic characters. With double the drama and double the fun, we hope that the audiencetoo will show us double the love.”
This latest original series comes on the back of several successful and award-winning hits from Arré over the last 18 months.These include A.I.SHA My Virtual Girlfriend, The Real High, I Don’t Watch TV, Arré Ho Ja Re-Gender, and Fitoor Mishra Ki CommentArré. While Season 1of A.I.SHA has won 14 awards across prestigious web festivals such as LA Web Festival, South Florida Web Festival, Asia Web Awards, CMO Asia Branding Excellence Awards, and the Washington Roman Pictures Network.TV, Official Chukyagiriwas a Webby Honoree. and Season 2 of A.I.SHA has just won again at the South Florida Web Festival.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
