The Royals

If you’ve followed Hindi web shows long enough, you’ll know that “fun & frothy” is streaming lingo (and euphemism) for “empty, expensive, glossy, puerile, performative and garishly produced young-adult-but-Bollywood-scale entertainment”. It’s a very specific subgenre of designer nothingness — the storytelling equivalent of a brown mannequin at a MET gala whose theme is ‘Sexy and Flawed’. Think Four More Shots Please!, Eternally Confused and Eager for Love, Mismatched, Jee Karda, Call Me Bae and now, The Royals: a series so frothy and stretched that a dust storm wrecked my room, the wifi broke, I fell violently ill and a war broke out in the real world during its 8-episode run.

The Royals packs in every bit of drama, comedy, and romantic tension in its eight episodes. Teeming with a large cast of characters, the series focuses on the romance between a Maharaja and a Madam CEO. While their love story anchors the show, the lives of the supporting characters too deserve a bit more attention. Co-created by Rangita Pritish Nandy and Ishita Pritish Nandy, the Netflix series is in a similar vein to Four More Shots Please! also produced by the same company. However, the Indian royal setting in Rajasthan adds that extra bit of glamour. Ishaan Khatter is Aviraaj Singh, the reluctant heir to the royal throne of Morpur, who meets his match in WorkPotato CEO Sophia Kanmani Shekhar (Bhumi Pednekar). Opposites attract and then proceed to spend much of the show denying their feelings for one another as they work to transform the palace Motibagh into a royal bed and breakfast. Around them, there are many saboteurs and well-wishers, and both Sophia’s company and the crumbling Morpur estate act as a hindrance. Then, of course, there are the other members of the royal family who are dealing with their own issues after the death of the previous Maharaja (Milind Soman).

Netflix’s new web series The Royals- featuring Bhumi Pednekar and Ishaan Khatter- holds a lot of potential. In a crime thriller-infested OTT space, light-hearted romantic comedies are a win-win, particularly at a time when there is so much despair outside the screen otherwise. One would ideally want to sit back, grab a bucket of popcorn or a tub of ice cream, and binge-watch the slow-burning romance between Ishaan and Bhumi on the show. The Royals, after all, is a story of a reluctant prince and a go-getter self-made woman- they look good, they have smoldering chemistry, and the locations are fabulous- all serving as a perfect ingredient for a feel-good romance drama. Yet creator Rangita Pritish Nandy’s The Royals falters too much, making the premise of the whole show feel too superfluous and lame to be taken seriously.

It’s laughable at first, like the main actors are caricatures. Curiously named Sophia Kanmani Shekhar (Bhumi Pednekar), the award-winning entrepreneur shows the middle finger to VIPs. Especially those that come riding a horse shirtless on a Sri Lankan beach. The Shirtless Sultan as Aviraaj (Ishaan Khatter) is later crowned, show creator Neha Sharma and directors Priyanka Ghose and Nupur Asthana labour at taking his shirt off to show a royal six-pack in swimming pools, during photo shoots and atop a horse. There’s equal effort put in to have Sophia-Aviraaj grab each other, smooch, grope, grow apart, a dozen times. VIP-hating Sophia, as confused as her name, has conceived Royal B & B, her own genius business model to have blue blood mingle with hoi polloi. An early taste of she-doesn’t-know-where-she’s-at: an encounter with same middle finger VIP at a bar. The next moment, they’re smooching in a room, ready for action. Only to end up calling each other names and to pull out saying, it was a mistake.

The ‘Royal falls for commoner’ trope is not new. In the Netflix show The Royals, creators Rangita Pritish Nandy and Ishita Pritish Nandy take this idea and hand it over to writers who squeeze every drop out of the cliche. On paper, the idea of an heir to an aristocratic house in Rajasthan falling in love with a self-made CEO of a hospitality start-up could have been fun. Add stunning locales, a few clever casting choices and a whole lot of pomp and drama and conflicts and you have the basis for a romantic drama. But that potential is not fully realised in The Royals. The eight-episode series is set in the fictitious Morpur, amidst the crumbling facades and fraying brocades of fading royalty. Playboy and model Aviraaj “Fizzy” Singh (Ishaan Khatter) returns home for the reading of his father’s will. Yuvanath Singh (Milind Soman) – now resting in a garlanded frame (and seen in flashbacks) – is also the father of Digvijay “Diggy” (Vihaan Samat) and Divyaranjini “Jinnie” (Kavya Trehan).

When a prince of a dippy, strapped-for-cash royal family meets a pushy possessor of a hospitality start-up, foreplay makes way for a financially profitable proposition. Creator Rangita Pritish Nandy’s modern-day fairy tale, directed by Priyanka Ghose and Nupur Asthana, is tailor-made for rom-com vibes. While the makers embellish the couple’s ‘blow hot and cold’ equation with ample of visual razzmatazz, their wet blanket chemistry and dowdily-crafted scenes of ‘opposites attract’ prove to be a buzzkill for its eight scatterbrained episodes. Add to that a cliffhanger ending and unresolved issues that follow once skeletons pop out of the closet, the prolonging seems unwarranted.

If ’thirst trap’ had an eight-episode embodiment, it would be called The Royals. Netflix’s newest offering — a Mills & Boon paperback set in the visually rich world of Indian royalty — has its leading man Ishaan Khatter, dropping his shirt at the drop of a hat. From that first scene of the actor riding a horse on the beach with next to nothing on him, you know that Ishaan is here to satiate the female gaze. Which the actor — earnest, charismatic — manages to achieve to some extent. But I longed for a more brooding, almost Byronic hero. One so tortured by his past that he is unable to forge meaningful relationships in the present. Heathcliff-ian to some extent, perhaps, within as much as the gilded world of The Royals would allow. What we get instead in Ishaan’s Aviraaj Singh is a man child — a poor little rich prince who, when faced with a sticky situation, either shuts himself out or throws a fit or stomps off in anger. Sometimes he does all three together. Always to the viewer’s chagrin.