Manasa Sharma, who began her film career as a writer and associate director in the OTT space, recently made her directorial debut with the SonyLiv original series Bench Life, which released on September 12. Produced by Niharika Konidela under Pink Elephant Pictures, the show follows a bunch of software employees who are deliberately part of the Bench team, in their aim for other discreet pursuits, both personal and professional. Manasa talks to CE about the origins of the show, using her personal life experiences while writing fictional stories, her future filmmaking aspirations, among other subjects.
SonyLiv wanted to make a series that’s based on the IT industry, so they approached Pink Elephant Pictures, with whom we had made Oka Chinna Family Story (OCFS) earlier. Apparently, they mentioned it would be nice if the OCFS team worked on this. Earlier, we thought of other ideas that had more technical details about the software industry, but then we decided to conceive a show that caters to people from all walks of life, instead of being completely technical.
So we took the concept of Bench Team as the situation of the people there, and once you go beyond the first 15 minutes, you will move past the core concept of software industry and end up following the characters. We were conscious that we don’t want to constrain ourselves to just the IT niche. Also, we wanted to introduce the concept in a fun way, not a preachy way.
That’s why we added that intro scene and that ch.