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.
The density (or greed) of the show — based in the Mumbai of the early 2000s — becomes its undoing. If Chaar Yaar were a person, it’d be that new and overstimulated friend who’s kind of cool to hang out with in the beginning but the novelty wears out and he starts borrowing money and dragging you to shady events. The honeymoon period is short and sharp. The protagonists are four young middle-class friends: Jay Gala (Prayrak Mehta), Tony Gomes (Saqib Ayub), Sahil Shaikh (Purav Jha) and his cousin Sameer Khilji (Naman Jain). The setting is the king; someone quotes Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya, another refers to Karan Johar and Dil Chahta Hai as trends.
Our Gujarati boy Jay is the MBA-coded brain, the others are there for vibes. Jay’s ‘girlfriend’ Jinal suddenly needs 10 lakhs, so the four turn to a loan-shark-cum-car-dealer-cum-gangster named Imtiaz Engineer (Sikandar Kher), which in turn pushes them into the high-stakes world of carjacking to return his money. Parallely, we see the other side of the law represented by Sumati Bhalerao (Sai Tamhankar), a doughty crime branch officer stuck in a department of patriarchal bosses. She makes it her life’s mission to bust this car-theft racket. So far, so simple.
Not even Jay’s annoying and completely unnecessary voice-over — which doubles up as a screenplay narration — can spoil the sparse party. The idea, it seems, is to pit a showy criminal-origin story against a heady buddy drama; you know the friends will struggle to resist the temptations of breaking bad. You know they will almost be torn apart a bunch of times; you also know their resolutions will be swift and convenient. The ‘business’ they choose offers plenty of Mumbai by night, too, in an age where technology hasn’t yet caught up with the freedom of organised crime; there’s even space for a detailed training montage (“research, strategy, execution”) for these budding entrepreneurs. If only Chaar Yaar had stayed humble and contained: four desperate kids, one colourful crook, and one stubborn cop.
But it expands every five minutes like an overconfident balloon. New characters drop in like uninvited guests at a party where everyone’s doing their own thing. Imtiaz occupies his own big-boy cocaine empire featuring a kingpin (Chunky Panday) and three hungry successors: all of whom were probably four young friends in the past. They’re the cautionary future of the boys. They spend the whole series double-crossing each other and wondering who the wild cards are. Sumati belongs to a police force headed by a dubious encounter specialist (Rajesh Tailang), who is always in cahoots with each of the gangsters; her ex-boyfriend is summoned to head the Mumbai task force. An old Maharashtrian couple named Mr. and Mrs. Narvekar is introduced as sinister Bob Biswas-coded assassins; the series doesn’t know what to do with this gimmick after three scenes.
At some point, Pankaj Jha appears as a UP-based kingpin (again) who feeds traitors to crocodiles and hires the pals; they start their own little ‘company’ Rocket Singh-style while working for Imtiaz. I could swear I saw Nassar appear as a nefarious millionaire (or was that Reporting Live?) for a hot second. And I’m not even getting into the internal conflicts: someone is dating someone’s sister, someone gets addicted to cocaine, someone gets a finger chopped off, Jay postures like Harshad Mehta.
It’s a lot. Take a breath. The connective tissue is weak; every arc is designed to hijack the same show instead of composing its chaos. There are two shootouts — one at the halfway point and one in the climax — where everyone converges and colludes, as one often does in this crowded genre. The shock value, though, is traded for a farcical pattern of characters gatecrashing the fate of the terrified boys — who are let off the hook too easily because they’re friends, you see. Never mind that they steal hundreds of cars and get drunk on power, because their motto is to only rob from the rich.
It doesn’t help that officer Bhalerao seems to be trapped in a time-warp of sorts; everyone else rises, falls, rises back again and falls, but her journey moves slower than the others. The intent is to perhaps show her doggedness, but she’s on the fourth dream-level of Inception while the rest unravel in a hurry. The dissonance between them is stark, and it feels as if a decade worth of ‘activity’ is crammed into two years so that they can threaten a sequel.
It takes some doing for a cast ranging from Prayrak Mehta (the breakout actor of Kohrra 2) to the prolific Sikander Kher and Rajesh Tailang (who, for a change, plays a bad guy) to not make an impact. One can blame the too-many-cooks writing or the general OTT template, but several arcs are just cut short or put on timeout when the script paints itself into a corner. Actors like Dibyendu Bhattacharya commit to their moments and the many exposition dumps parading as snarky dialogue, but to no avail.
At least one of the younger lot hams it up when a drug smuggling racket abruptly falls into their lap and forces the show to switch tracks when the car-jacking has nowhere to go. The female characters are given some agency, but it feels like charity to balance the testosterone flooding through every frame. There’s the illusion that the premise keeps sprinting, but all Chaar Yaar leaves you with (apart from memories of Kishore Kumar’s voice in Sharaabi) is the exasperation of groaning “yaar” after watching a slog that’s four episodes too broad. Wait, did I just fat-shame a show?