Chaar Yaar

Four friends, empty pockets and a talent for turning every good day into a disaster. Chaar Yaar looks like a cool, young crime caper about hustling your way to the top. There are stolen cars, dangerous gangsters, messy friendships and a cop on their trail. The boys have the jugaad, the attitude and the ambition. They believe their story is an RGV-style drama, but what they don’t have is a screenplay that knows when to stop.

Somewhere between passive-viewing content and algorithmic entertainment, there is a field. Shows like Chaar Yaar (“Four Friends”) will meet you there. It is not bad. It is not good. It is arguably something worse: middling and overlong. The 8-episode crime drama takes a stacked cast full of watchable performers and flattens them into a distracted underworld tale that keeps chasing its own tail. Watching the series is strange because most scenes look fine at an individual level: the acting, writing, staging, banter. But they don’t make sense as an aggregative experience, pulling us in multiple directions like a shopkeeper trying to exhaust his stock on a lazy customer.