Rohan Naahar

One of Javed Akhtar’s favourite stories to tell is about fishing. Regardless of the venue — it could be an international seminar or one of those ‘naastik parishad’ meetings that he enjoys attending — he regales the audience with a carefully constructed bit about why fishing is considered a relaxing recreational activity while hunting is mostly outlawed across the world. The only reason for this, he declares in his punchline, is because fish don’t have vocal chords. They can’t shriek in agony when they’re pierced by a hook, scaled alive, and left to suffocate. Fishing has great PR, as do the folks behind the blockbuster film Chhaava, even though it incited a riot.

Tears are just grief leaving our body, says Dr Michael Robinavitch in The Pitt. It’s one of the many pearls of wisdom that he drops through the 15-episode first season of the medical drama, which is streaming in its entirety on Jio Hotstar. Known as ‘Dr Robby’ to everyone around him, and those who will never see him again, he is the ‘chief attending’ at a Pittsburgh hospital’s emergency department. His job is to run the day shift as smoothly as he can, despite all the difficulties that the modern healthcare system throws at him. He must do his best with an under-staffed and under-funded team; he must deal with belligerent patients, and, towards the end of the season, an unprecedented tragedy that will require him and his fellow doctors to go above and beyond the call of duty.

Viola Davis is an EGOT. She’s one of only 20 people in history — fewer, when you consider persons of colour — to have won at least one Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. She’s done August Wilson on the stage and screen; she went to Juilliard, like Jessica Chastain and Adam Driver. For her to star in a movie like G20 — think Air Force One, but worse — isn’t unlike Javed Akhtar waking up one morning, slipping into a crisp kurta, and deciding to script one of KRK’s rant videos. Released on Prime Video, G20 is a glorified bargain bin movie — the kind of movie for which Amazon should be paying you, and not the other way around. Davis plays POTUS Danielle Sutton, an Iraq War veteran who became famous after being photographed carrying a baby out of a bombed building. The movie doesn’t show us what happened next, but you could easily imagine Danielle being deified in the press, buying into her own myth, and deciding to run for president. America loves its celebrities, and electing Danielle into office is exactly what you’d expect from the folks who’ve voted Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump into power. We first meet Danielle as she’s disciplining her teenage daughter for giving the secret service the slip, and partying with her friends at a local bar.

Contrary to what Hussain Dalal might have you believe, there is an art to writing bad television. A bad show owns its contrivances instead of making excuses for them; a bad show embraces its heightened drama without pretending that it wants to be taken seriously. It scoffs in the face of concepts such as internal logic and organic character development. It chooses twists over tact, and chaos over narrative control. But what makes a bad show good? It all boils down to an indescribable self-awareness. And while Netflix’s medical drama Pulse checks all the above boxes — it’s trash TV of the topmost order — it never fully commits to the cause. Pulse is bad in the traditional sense of the word, in that it’s utterly incoherent, laughably plotted, and contains such a shocking depiction of sexual harassment that you might momentarily be confused into thinking that Bollywood was somehow involved. Incidentally, Pulse happens to be star Willa Fitzgerald’s second anti-feminist project in a row, after the thriller film Strange Darling. Directed by JT Mollner, Strange Darling seemingly took offence at the indisputable fact that the serial killer genre is dominated by men. “Are you saying women can’t be serial killers?” the movie seemed to ask. “How dare you; now watch this.”

If Bollywood were any more exploitative than it already is, it would’ve got the struggling Dibakar Banerjee to direct Loveyapa as a gun-for-hire. But then, it wouldn’t have been the same garbage movie. Banerjee would’ve spotted the inherent toxicity of its protagonists — played by two-time offenders Khushi Kapoor and Junaid Khan — and attempted to unpack the patriarchal systems that made them this way. Had Banerjee directed this movie, Khan would’ve almost certainly become a mascot for toxic masculinity at just two films old. The only difference is that Maharaj, his debut film, had no idea that his character was a terrible person. Loveyapa, on the other hand, appears to at least recognise his ‘flaws’, but expects you to root for him regardless.

Movies like Officer on Duty make it difficult for you to give Indian filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. How could the widely celebrated writer Shahi Kabir, who broke out with the excellent Malayalam-language procedural Nayattu some years ago, produce something as misguided as Officer on Duty? Now out on Netflix after a successful theatrical run, the police thriller lacks everything that made Nayattu such a memorable pandemic-era experience; little attention is paid to the cultural specificities, the writing prioritises plot over characters, and unlike the rather progressive themes that Nayattu niftily wove into its riveting narrative, the politics in Officer on Duty are highly objectionable.

Deva is like one of those movies that Mahesh Bhatt would ‘direct’ over the phone in the 90s. It has all the ingredients — a brutish hero with a heart of gold, plenty of flimsy female characters that exist purely to serve him, and plotting that relies almost entirely on contrivances and clichés. The only thing it doesn’t have is Avtar Gill in a supporting role, but guess what, Upendra Limaye more than makes up for it. Starring Shahid Kapoor, Deva is directed by Rosshan Andrrews; it’s a remake of his Malayalam-language original, titled Mumbai Police. They downplayed the remake angle during the promotions, to the point that it almost felt like they were pretending that Deva was an original. And then, news began to spread about Andrrews having shot three different climaxes for the movie, perhaps in an effort to throw audiences off, or — and this is more likely — to lure them into theatres with the tease of something new.

Embracing the immaturity of a sitcom and the put-on sophistication of prestige TV, Netflix’s The Residence nestles into a comfy stylistic nook that makes more than eight hours of (surprisingly dense) storytelling go by in a flash. The murder mystery show is produced by the prolific Shonda Rhimes but spearheaded by writer Paul William Davies, who injects it with such an infectious sense of fun that you can’t help but play along. At least until the feature-length finale, which strains to deliver the sort of satisfying climax that you’d expect from a show that name-checks The Murder of the Orient Express and Knives Out with such affection. The genre’s ongoing resurgence didn’t, as many have decided, begin with Rian Johnson’s hit. The movie did admittedly well, leaving Netflix with no option but to hurl a reported $100 million at Daniel Craig to lure him back as the smooth-talking detective Benoit Blanc. But a couple of years before Knives Out, however, director Kenneth Branagh reintroduced Agatha Christie’s enduring detective Hercule Poirot to audiences with his largely reverential The Murder of the Orient Express. Believe it or not, the movie was a bigger hit than Knives Out. Branagh made the correct decision to not tinker with the book’s now-legendary climax, having understood that without it, it’s no different from the scores of other murder mysteries that Christie would churn out on a monthly basis.