I have read some comments which are critical of world of a village depicted in Amazon series 'Panchayat'. (I am yet to complete 2nd season as of writing this.) Even if I have liked the series so far, I do not disagree with these criticisms. It is indeed a simplification that takes out certain necessary nuances because it wants to tell a story and any story cannot have all nuances. For example, Panchayat is somewhat unabashed about whole informal institution of female Pradhan being a puppet while her husband being one calling shots. Rather than mocking such arrangements, easy way to get pats on the back, Panchayat takes them as given and goes ahead. This is a step ahead than typical caricature of villages as a place where everything fails or everything is inherently meaningful.
Panchayat is essentially a show for an urban Indian whose rural connection is severed, perhaps few generations before. The key difference Panchayat has is that there is no unambiguous nostalgia or lament for this severed connection as it was in similar literature or movies few decades back. I remember a popular saying 'True India is in the villages' that captures this lament very well. The target audience wants a story that does not lead to guilt or painful self-examination but can pinch while being entertaining. That is the way of the market and makers cannot be blamed by not selling different product in this market.
Those who do not have such deeply severed connection or have contemporary professional exposure to social reality of rural India might have some discomfort with Panchayat. It is indeed possible that we have genuine (not a compulsive 'karyakarta' discomfort against anything from 'other' camp) discomfort with a very popular, well-acclaimed story (movie or literature). I had a very bad, discomforting feeling while watching 3 idiots. I hated the implicit and explicit mockery of - hard-working or serious students and role of abstraction in science (that scene where Rancho mocks a 'definition'). I was one of the hard working students for considerable phase of my student life and I didn't think I missed out on anything when I worked hard. Similarly making abstract concepts entertaining hardly helps anyone, those who get it will get it and those who get entertained are hardly going to get it. Entertainment simply helps them forget the fact that they have not got it. Cute videos or songs around mathematical concepts might seem like short-cuts, but they are roads diverging from rather than converging towards the ultimate point of understanding.
Similarly, Panchayat might seem like an unlikely occurrence to those who know more out of lived experience or exposure. Let me call this discomfort 'unlikeliness'. The 'unlikeliness' is essentially an insider perspective. For example, for the local train commuter in Mumbai, portrayal of local train commute as a comfortable or decent experience is an unlikely portrayal. But someone who is not an 'insider' will not see the 'unlikeliness'. Rohington Mistry's 'A Fine Balance' has a character that has such rosy and unlikely notion about local train travel which gets brutally squashed when the character actually experiences the local train travel.
But if stories are to serve their main purpose, of providing an escape (from whatever would have been our experience in absence of stories, may be unnerving face-to-face to the matrix of the existence) then they have to be unlikely. Aesop's fables or Akbar-Birbal tales have their charms due to their unlikeliness. That does not make the criticism of 'unlikeliness' worthless. The criticism is useful to tag the creation as not a reference to gauge the reality. For example, TV daily soaps are not the way most of Indian families spend their days. But criticism of unlikeliness should not subdue the fun as well. The conscious choice of separating fun from referencing story for reality is after all viewers' choice, not of the makers.