Manoj Bajpayee’s The Family Man could well be rechristened The Meme Man. Since the spy thriller’s third season dropped on Prime Video last week, the internet is having a field day with memes inspired by Srikant Tiwari’s witty comebacks. One of them is the sequence where Srikant’s son asks him if he has a code name like “Tiger, Panther, or Lion”. Straight-faced, he replies, “Beta main intelligence mein kaam karta hoon, circus mein nahin.” Many viewers assumed it was a dig at the YRF spy universe.

When we ask dialogue writer Sumit Arora, he clarifies, “The idea is to show that a spy is a middle-class guy. His kid could be growing up on the same kind of things as everybody else does. So, [he would imagine] that a spy has cool gadgets and a code name. We referred to the overall pop culture; it wasn’t a direct reference to the spy universe.”

Another scene where Srikant’s son schools him on gender pronouns — as the former takes it in, part-baffled and part-exasperated — is being talked about. Gender pronouns are a fairly new concept. Arora says the pursuit was to have fun with it.

“I relate with Srikant because I am a small-town boy, who is adjusting to the city culture. When Srikant is [relieved] that these gender pronouns are not being used in Hindi, that’s how I would react.”

But such dialogues also run the risk of offending viewers, who might feel the writing is mocking their preferences. “Humour will offend somebody or the other. Suman [Kumar] wrote it in the screenplay, and I added my own humour. We’ll take the blame if somebody is offended.”