08 January,2022 07:33 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
A still from Kaun Banegi Shikharwati
No, is this really a spoof of Squid Games, already? A series of moronic games play out in this show, among four estranged sisters, with their equally estranged father, setting them up for a domestic battle against each other.
The contestants are mostly dressed in track-suits of the same colour, with stripes on the arm's length, at least once in light greens as well. That's an âinspiration' rather too soon after the Korean Netflix series dropped and strangely enthralled the world, no?
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The setting here is supposedly a 200-room palace in Rajasthan, with God knows how many servants - being paid for, God knows how - that belong to the visiting sisters, who would've been legit princesses, if India wasn't a sovereign republic.
Their dad is referred to as the king alright. He also thinks of himself as one, albeit of a village, as it looks like, which has about 120 people living in it, as we speak.
That, I'm guessing, is the greater source for this send-up/satire. Although I have to say, there's something about a spoof on a "royal" family in general, and self-appointed HRHs in particular, that no matter what the treatment/story, it feels like a spoof of a spoof, anyway.
Had felt the same for Shashank Ghosh's utterly unwatchable Khubsoorat (2014), with Fawad Khan, sub-continent's heart-throb, simply walking all over the screen overdressed in expensive suits, going from bed/bathroom to the living room, all through!
This series is a lot easier on the eye. The only bit I found funny though is the âking' getting angered by his deputy, he calls âfriend', because his royal highness didn't like what the deputy was doing, when he showed up in his dream!
This dad and the daughters haven't seen each other in years. The dad feigns illness to bring them together. He sets in motion the âRoyal Games', in order to decide who will become the heir, or Kaun Banegi Shikharwati, to the sprawling property.
Which, given that it's ancestral, will get equally divided between the children in any case. You don't have to wait until the end for a character to reveal this simple point of law. What do you do in the interim - that is, over ten episodes, for what's presumably only the first season of this series?
Watch the random Roadies or Bigg Boss tasks, one after another, apparently based on the nine rasas, or emotional states of mind - veer (heroism), bhayanak (fear), hasya (laughter), etc.
Trust all this is in the visible interest of mostly over-the-top comedy - only that I'm unable to see anything, but more of the same. With hardly a goal in sight. And the ladies nagging/gagging each other in general.
Bookended with a definite beginning and an end, but with no middle, you could sleep-watch this over a couple of hours, which would perfectly fit an average length feature - without labouring through miles of emptiness between. Which is also what you could say for the second-rate sequel of Aarya, similarly set in Rajasthan, that I watched recently. Only, that was a dark thriller of sorts.
This is a much milder, low-intensity, wholly inoffensive, totally pointless show, low on ambition and stake, with shorter 30-minute episodes, and beats similar to network television. Yup, you could simply zone out before the TV screen, even if for over five hours. Apparently, audiences on average anyway spent four hours daily on regular TV (something I learnt from this show's producer, the media maven Sameer Nair, once).
Perhaps, and I'm thinking hard here, the attempt is to somehow adapt the Disney Princess genre for young desi adults? In which case I'm not the target audience. Why was I drawn to it then? For an OTT show, that's turning out to be the best hunting ground for fresh, untested acting talents, the experienced cast here is beyond stellar, to begin with.
A full set of pretty/pleasant looking, perfectly fine Bollywood actors - Lara Dutta, Soha Ali Khan, Kritika Kamra, Cyrus Sahukar, etc. Above all, of course, India's finest, Naseeruddin Shah, as the king (last seen as the Hindustani classical musician in Bandish Bandits), along with Raghubir Yadav (Panchayat), playing the king's adorable deputy.
The latter two deserve a fully renewed career as leads on OTT - that's what else, if not Film 2.0? Naseer, in particular, is ageing better than the best - what's anyone doing wasting him on a show, with no head, no tail; na-seer, na paiyr, yo?
