The latest third season of The Family Man, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, was shot in Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, marking one of the most high-profile productions in the region.
The season widens its canvas to the Northeast, weaving in cross-border tensions and insurgency, with the plot exploring how COVID-19 becomes a distraction even as external actors attempt to expand influence along the border.
With major OTT platforms increasingly filming in Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and neighboring states, the Northeast is emerging as a new production hub for streaming giants. For Nagaland and the wider Northeast, the shift is being welcomed for visibility and economic opportunity. At the same time, it is creating conversations about how the region may now be imagined within the national mainstream.
Other productions have followed. Delhi Crime Season 3 included sequences filmed in the Northeast, while Paatal Lok Season 2 shot in Assam and Nagaland to depict socio-political realities. The use of real locations and some locals in the crew have given the shows a visual authenticity rarely seen in mainstream Indian content.
While not a substitute for structural change, the on-screen presence of the Northeast is being received by many as a break from years of feeling unseen and stereotyped.
The rising visibility comes at a time when Asian soft power is reshaping global media trends. Media cultures from South Korea, Japan and Thailand – from K-pop and anime to Thai BL dramas – have reshaped global streaming trends and youth consumption patterns. For a region often perceived as culturally closer to East and Southeast Asia than mainland India, this shift gives representation a different weight, arriving at a time when cultural influence is flowing eastward rather than westward.
Yet even as visibility grows, representation remains largely directed from outside the region. The Northeast is appearing more often on screen, but creative authority still rests elsewhere, shaping how the region is imagined for national audiences.
A review by Angshuman Choudhury, a joint doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London, and Manoranjan Pegu of the Tribal Intellectual Collective, notes that Paatal Lok acknowledges New Delhi’s “manipulative politics of inducements and federal control in the Northeast,” including internal fractures within Naga society. However, it argues that the broader narrative remains aligned with a “benign state that is flawed in so many ways, but wants to do good in Nagaland,” and that scrutiny of New Delhi remains “disjointed and unserious” given the region’s history of state violence and AFSPA.
The reviewers add that while the series touches on themes of corruption and destabilisation, core concerns such as Naga self-determination remain only “tangentially” addressed, noting that mainstream portrayals risk simplifying sensitive political issues, even when handled cautiously.
Meanwhile, at the industry level, the shift is being shaped not only on screen but also through policy. State facilitation for film production has already begun in parts of the Northeast. In Nagaland, the government notified its Film Policy 2024, introducing single-window clearances and positioning cinema as a tool to promote tourism. Meghalaya has gone a step further, approving a Film Tourism Policy for 2025 that offers financial incentives of up to ¹ 1 crore or 25 per cent of production costs for the first ten films, alongside additional incentives for local talent, local-language content and premieres on Hello Meghalaya, the State’s official OTT platform. Other states are yet to adopt similar frameworks, and there is no uniform regional policy at present.
For now, the development remains at an early stage, visible enough to be noticed, but still unfolding in ways the region has yet to define.