‘Nach Baliye 7’: Love, ‘baliye’s and all the drama; but where’s the ‘Nach’?

There’s UpMa from ‘Bigg Boss 7’ – Karishma Tanna and Upen Patel – and there’s Sana Saeed and her newly found boyfriend. There’s ‘Cinestars Ki Khoj’s contestants Himmanshoo Malhotra and Amruta Khanvilkar and there’s Ranveer of TV show ‘Meri Aashiqui Tumse Hi’ – Shakti Arora and his fiancee Neha Saxena. And there’s the ‘Uttaran’ couple – Rashami Desai and Nandish Sandhu. Others we don’t remember.

Yes, there’s TV actor Jay Soni too with his wife and Payal Rohatgi with Sangram Singh.

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But if a long list of 11 star couples asks to be thought about again and again, something’s wrong with the starry-ness of the couples. Blame it on the hype created over them or just the regular expectations; the reality falls short.

The ‘Raman Bhalla’ of Indian TV – Karan Patel – hosts the show with Rithvik Dhanjani, the winner of season 6 along with his ‘Baliye’ Asha Negi, who’ll be reportedly seen anchoring another reality show with actor Hussain Kuwajerwala. Rithvik is good and so is his style – cool, subtle and casual. The previous experience in hosting works for him for sure.

The soon-to-get-hitched Karan, though looked jittery at the start, managed to be better as the episode progressed. But wasn’t he a participant in one of the seasons of the show and was accused to be faking a relationship?

Talking about the judges, yes, they are new. Choreographer Marzi Pestonji makes a good judge as he judges the contestants only on the basis of dancing and nothing else. Good.

Preity Zinta is there, who judges on chemistry.

And then there is Chetan Bhagat. Pause.

We failed to understand at the start what he was there for. A writer he is; atleast that’s how we know him. That he was a good dancer in his IIT days is still a matter of doubt. But then, he spoke and all our doubts were put to rest.

So, while he called one of the couples – Ankit Ranka and his wife – “runaway couple” because they eloped and got married and policed the new couple – Sana Saeed and Dipesh Sharma – about not just the Saturdays, but also the Mondays and Tuesdays of couple life, Chetan Bhagat said he was there to judge the genuinity of the couples. Hmmm! Wasn’t the show named ‘Nach Baliye’? This #TooMuch season is actually too much.

So, while the previous seasons of the much celebrated couple dance show were all about dance, this season is a far cry. We call it “‘Nach Baliye’ meets ‘Splitsvilla’ meets ‘Bigg Boss'”. And literally so, with all the flavours of an Ekta Kapoor’s drama, since she is producing the show, it fails to nail on what it should have – the dance.

There’s futility injected in this season with all the off-screen drama that’s happening, claiming to judge the contestants on their compatibility and the love they share. And hence, there was a set-up where the male contestants were made to believe that their ‘baliyes’ bus was on fire. So, some dared to the cross the ‘Lakshman Rekha’ and some didn’t. And were judged. This made Upen Patel, Jay Soni and Shakti Arora enter into an ugly spat. Okay…give us some dance.

What we do like about the show is the audacity. And there are many types to it – the audacity with which they preach about love and true love, the audacity with which they compare love marriages and arranged marriages and the audacity with which they make the sane judges fight on what is better – storytelling or dancing (poorest scripting in decades, we say). And we are not being sarcastic.

To be true, the ones who will watch the show will do either to judge UpMa on their parameters or Chetan Bhagat’s knack of judging “dance” or an Ekta Kapoor kind of reality show. We watch it for some genuine laughs. Thanks, we say.