Showtime promises us a great deal: a juicy deep-dive into the inner workings of Bollywood, which, with all its gossipy Chinese whispers and starry tantrums, is also a place where business comes first and last, and everything else is just a shoe-horn.
Coming from the stable of Karan Johar, and created by Sumit Roy, anything that holds out potential insights into the insider-outsider debates that have caused such deep rifts between the entitled legatees who gate-keep their preserve and those who desperately want to crash the party, this new web-series should have been a zinger. But going by the first four episodes (the next instalment comes in June), it’s all too-familiar territory which stays mostly on the surface.
Naseeruddin Shah plays Victor Kapoor, an old-style producer in the process of losing control of his famous studio, ceding power reluctantly to his estranged son Raghu (Emraan Hashmi). When the canny coot throws a spanner in the works, leading to a total novice (a newbie film critic, no less) showing up to claim her stake, things start to warm up. Clashes abound. Old-style moviemaking where everyone was family versus creating a hundred crore ‘projects’ with A-list stars. Writers who want to tell ‘their own stories’ versus cobbled-together plots toplining the big male star, and downsizing the talented newcomer. The games, the intrigue, the back-stabbing: the script gives us all of it, almost as if it is by-the-number, but almost nothing leaves any impact, not even the meta touches, where we are meant to guess which character is based on which real-life celeb.
It’s even more disappointing, given that it has Naseeruddin Shah and Emraan Hashmi, both capable of burning up the screen: both come off as tropes, the former with his ‘dhandha nahin dharam hai’ catch-phrase, the latter as a producer who knows how to win the box-office, dismissing carping critics. So is the case with the others: Rajeev Khandelwal, as Armaan Khanna, the star who wants his own way at all costs, Mouni Roy as the ‘item girl’ who will do anything to turn into a ‘real’ leading lady, Shriya Saran as the older female star who has no compunction in stealing a film for her ‘comeback’.
I wanted to see more of the actors playing the foul-mouthed fellow who trouble-shoots for Hashmi, brandishing that Salman Khan bracelet, and the earnest writer: both characters who could have given us a fresh perspective on how things are managed while those giving the orders keep their paws clean. The appearance of real-life Dharma stars is built in, but they’re gone in a flash after mouthing platitudes about how great it is to have a female-owned studio.
Most disappointing is the lukewarm way in which the putative star of the show is written: as Mahika Nandy, who calls out the customary bribery her tribe is given in return for a four star review, Makwana should literally have been the one to give us an as-yet unexplored angle to this star-spangled story.
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Most of us have heard about this dodgy connection between production houses and positive reviews, and this would have been a great opportunity to excavate that, and as well as other unsavoury practices of the ‘filmi jagat’, giving us insights into this world of false glitter and broken promises. Makwana is fresh-faced, but there needed to be much more depth to her character, which in a heart-beat changes– in the course of one scene– from a girl who knows nothing (‘main kya karoongi, mujhe toh kuch nahin aata’) to a sharp creator of movies that will last forever. Huh?
This is the kind of series where a character is made to say with an absolute lack of irony: ‘karma is a b*tch’. That’s right. What you are left with are a few flashes of sharpness, which remind you of bits of the OG, Zoya Akhtar’s ‘Luck By Chance’. Will the next lot redeem the show? I really hope so.
Showtime cast: Emraan Hashmi, Rajeev Khandelwal, Mahima Makwana, Mouni Roy, Vijay Raaz
Showtime directors: Mihir Desai and Archit Kumar
Showtime rating: 2 stars
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