Given that the trailer set high expectations, and one was actually waiting for this to release on the 22nd of July, the letdown hurt twice as much. But the review is being written after a cooling off period, so the emotions are subdued, and I have tried to write a regular review. (yes, my regular reviews are this detailed)
What was this?
I am a little confused about the genre of this series.
This is not an awareness series (unless you count the name of the condition mentioned briefly on the screen).
This is not a love story.
It is not a mystery series of why his wife left him in the first place. Because that mystery never gets solved.
This is not a story of relationships, because all characters are so poorly sketched and even more shallowly presented.
If the idea was to showcase that Indians are not as open to their problems in bed as our woke metro brethren, that also flops, because, as the director already knows, sexologists are found only in small town India. And they make enough moneys to put large scale full wall ads from where the makers have shamelessly picked the name of the series. (I hope they sent a small royalty cheque to the original Dr. Arora, whose name also they have blatantly just picked up).
I am not sure, honestly, what this is. The short answer is, it really isn't anything. Its just that random mishmash that amounts to absolutely nothing.
Why this series should not have seen the light of day/night/OTT
I don't know any baba that gives private meetings of a certain kind to all female devotees.
I also don't know any SP who walks as comically as the character of SP Tomar.
I don't know any three time MLA who gets so publicly humiliated by his bedridden father at all times.
Women do not randomly invite male neighbours home, nor scream to them at night. That is not how colonies in small town India operate.
But most offensive of all, was the stalking of his ex-wife by Dr. Vishesh Arora. By the fourth episode, it is perfectly easy to start despising the character and wondering why he is stalking someone who so completely rejected him more than 17 years ago. What kind of content is being sold with the background music of a romantic song? A random romantic song playing in the background, a middle aged man looking wistfully into the distance, does not make stalking ok. I can't remember when I was that angry about the way women are projected on screen. (hence, the cooling off period before the review)
There is no storyline.
The characters, like I mentioned already, are shallow and poorly sketched. Make that not sketched at all. Its like a series of random caricatures that one forcibly fits into a room and then tries to build something around them.
The dialogues are so forgettable that i can't remember a single representative one, and I usually write a couple of representative dialogues in the review.
The art direction is as cliched as it gets. Neither authentic nor intriguing.
The other technical aspects - lighting, sound, cinematography, research, well, lets just say they are being omitted for a reason. The director omitted them from his work too.
Only one thing they did well - the casting. A script so laughable, so wrong at so many levels, needed superb acting. And the cast - lead and ensemble, does just that. Each actor is well chosen.
What their writer forgot to do in the script, the casting director has done in the auditions - and that is doubly laudable because s/he had so little to go on.
One line review:
This is the work of a woke director sitting in some metro who does not know his/her characters, their stories, their life beliefs, even their mannerisms, but insists on telling a story about them.
