The Ba***ds of Bollywood: Aryan Khan’s debut show lacks a ‘lakshya’

There are moments when the show sparkles with feeling, witty writing and just the right kind of spoofing. Aasmaan’s (Lakshya) bond with his parents is heartwarming, thanks to the great performances by Lakshya, Mona Singh and Vijayant Kohli. Ranveer Singh, Emraan Hashmi and Aamir Khan’s cameos are a hoot, Karan Johar is as over the top as social media accuses him of being, and Raghav Juyal has perfect comic timing. But there seems to be an indecisiveness about the overarching tone and treatment of the show. Is it a spoof on Bollywood films and their penchant for impossible love stories, a dark comedy on how there is more drama offscreen than onscreen in the industry, a multigenerational drama about two families and their twisted association with each other and Bollywood, a spoof on how audiences perceive movie celebrities on social media, a sarcastic validation of all our worst suspicions about Bollywood, or a rant against the movie business which seems to bring out the worst in people? The ‘raita’, as Parvaiz (Raghav Juyal) would have called it, keeps spreading, and the final twist seems like an attempt to mop things up with shock instead of resolving the multiple loose ends and half-baked storylines.

But that’s not the only problem. None of the characters seems to have a back story that’s more than a paragraph long. We don’t know how Aasmaan and Parvaiz met, what Parvaiz does for a living or why the two are joined at the hip like a couple. It almost made me wish that they were, now that would be groundbreaking. Characters narrate their own summary wherever applicable. Avtar (Manoj Pahwa), Aasmaan’s uncle, reveals to us that he was cheated by people he trusted. He also tells us that Aasmaan’s mother struggled to get a break but remained a background dancer for ten years. Aasmaan briefly talks about coming to Mumbai and joining the audition circuit, and producer Freddy Sodawallah (Manish Chaudhari) is defined by the fact that his father went missing. Ajay Talvar (Bobby Deol) is a Bollywood superstar with a penchant for tattoos, but we learn little over seven episodes about what makes/made him so successful. At the cost of sounding like I am nitpicking, I found the joke on the #MeToo movement wholly unnecessary. Even if you want to portray a crass character, he can’t just randomly appear on screen and mock a movement where women spoke about their traumatic experiences of sexual assault and workplace harassment.

There is also a lot of hard-to-believe stuff, or information that seems unnecessary, even in an over-the-top show. Aasmaan plays an action hero in his first film, but is prone to violence off-screen as well. In an age of social media and curated image management, it’s a little hard to believe that an ambitious young movie star would risk such red flag behaviour. His manager, Sanya (Anya Singh), is shown kissing a girl in one passing shot as if to explain to us why she maintains a professional relationship with her handsome client. Manish Chaudhari hams with sincerity, but we have no idea why he dresses as if he just teleported from the sets of Motwane’s Jubilee. There is an urban Gen Z version of Munna Bhaiyya whose default mode is nasty. Potential incest is brushed off with tears and a joke about meeting for Rakhi, and a woman has a direct line to a superstar she had a dalliance with 26 years ago. Though it is heartening to see a Hindu-Muslim friendship on screen that doesn’t preach or demand praise, I couldn’t help but wonder why Parvaiz is shown to be buddies with crooks who, in turn, are linked to an underworld don. Also, call me old, but the unbridled use of profanity on the show starts grating on the nerves pretty quickly.

It’s almost as if the writing team had received a mandate to include X number of curse words for every page of dialogue. Aryan Khan is in the unique position of being the insider son of an outsider. His parents, Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan and producer/interior designer Gauri Khan, were not just outsiders to Bollywood but to Mumbai itself. Shah Rukh Khan’s success is a modern-day fairytale that continues to draw thousands of aspiring actors to Bollywood each year. Aryan has grown up in the industry and seen the triumphs, trials and toxicity of the business first-hand. He has also borne the brunt of being the son of a famous man. Perhaps I was hoping that his first-hand knowledge of the business and the people who run it would offer us some insight into what keeps drawing artists to the uncertainty and dysfunction of Bollywood. Maybe he did, but it was lost in the maze of melodrama, or maybe he wants to keep the mystery alive a little longer.