The Ba***ds of Bollywood

Aasman Singh is an overnight sensation, having made a remarkable acting debut and working wonders. He gets into a salty banter with Karishma, the daughter of a star, Arjun Talvar, at a roundtable interview. Cashing in on the controversy, Aasman and Karishma are paired in a new film, and love is in the air. Yet, their romance struggles to take off, thanks to an ugly tiff, an underworld deal and a long-buried secret.

For as long as Bollywood has existed, dynasties have shaped its stories, both on and off screen. Shah Rukh Khan, however, was the self-made outlier—the Delhi boy who rewrote the rules of stardom. His son Aryan Khan inherits not just wealth and visibility, but the paradox of being heir to self-made Bollywood royalty. So, when Aryan steps forward as writer-director of The Ba***ds of Bollywood, the series is inevitably being measured against not just his craft but his surname also. From its opening frames, The Ba***ds of Bollywood announces itself as more than just another OTT drama. Aryan’s debut as director is glossy, meta, and occasionally satirical, as eager to lampoon the industry as it is to luxuriate in its glossy surfaces. The series is, in many ways, a tug-of-war between love and resentment: for the power of Bollywood mythology, for the spectacle of its excess, and for the suffocating hierarchies that govern who belongs and who does not. That tension animates the show, and also exposes its unevenness.

Social media might have bridged the distance between Bollywood stars and the common man, but the curiosity of fans and trolls to look at the view behind the camera remains unsatiated. Over the years, directors Farah Khan, Zoya Akhtar, and Karan Johar have used their access to inside stories to whet this appetite by creating pieces of entertaining cinema and peeping talk shows. Taking this ‘silsila’ forward, debutant Aryan Khan pulls back the curtains and brews an intoxicating concoction of gossip, news, and salacious details in between to mount a sharp take on the movie mafia, as Karan describes Bollywood biggies in the series, and their shenanigans and hypocrisy. Aryan uses his access to his father’s friends and colleagues not to paint a tribute, but to create subversive graffiti. He roasts his father’s friends, plays with their image, spoofs his detractors, and in the end gives the series a climactic twist, a quirk of fate that would make Manmohan Desai proud. The self-awareness of the insider doesn’t become frictional in the rollercoaster ride, and it is what separates Ba***ds of Bollywood from Tees Maar Khan of yore, giving it more heft than Om Shanti Om and more colour than Luck By Chance. When the asterisks in Ba***ds give way to the letters, the spirit of the series shines through.

When spanking new director Aryan Khan ends the first episode with an enforced raid sequence that signs off with ‘Say no to drugs’, you groan and wonder if he’s made this a childishly personal show.But as Aasmaan Singh (Lakshya), the boy from Delhi, rises, stumbles and bumbles around Mumbai – like desperately signing a 3-film contract with pompous producer Freddy Sodawallah (Manish Chaudhari) that soon has his career in knots – Aryan hooks you until he delivers a knockout punch at the end. It goes far beyond a glamorous parade of stars who keep popping up, a Ranbir Kapoor appearance most unexpected, Salman Khan turning up at a birthday party and Aamir-SS Rajamouli in a ‘serious debate’. Shah Rukh Khan is served as the cherry on top.

Bollywood is many things. The ugly, sweeping, mimicked moniker is an industry and a genre. It is a person and a personhood, a lifestyle and a livelihood. Over the years, multiple films have attempted taming the beast and dissecting, in varied ways, the mechanics of the space. If Farah Khan depicted an origin story of sorts in Om Shanti Om (2007) then Zoya Akhtar offered a more intimate portrayal of the industry through the lens of outsiders. Aryan Khan’s directorial, The Ba***ds of Bollywood lies somewhere in between. The seven-episode series has the campiness of Khan’s film and the conviction of Akhtar’s debut, culminating eventually as a show that deftly straddles emphasis with frivolity.

In the pre-social media era, Bollywood movies about Bollywood movies were more concerned with the culture of film-making. Be it the spoofy excesses of Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om or the playful curiosity of Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance, the Bombay industry — creative cameos, self-referential dialogue, colourful characters, on-set adventures — was merely a stepping-off point for the stories. However, this genre is very different in the digital age. It’s now concerned with the industry and the average viewer’s perception of it; it’s more alive to the internet than the world we live in. The storytelling rides the coattails of reddit-coded gossip, controversies, self-aware humour, sly potshots and guess-the-celebrity rumours. So the N-word (nepotism) and the M-word (meta) become everything. The problem is that this gimmick is hard to sustain in the long format. Shows like The Fame Game and Showtime stumbled after the winks wore off.