'Two Much with Kajol and Twinkle': Karan Johar and Janhvi Kapoor Episode Highlights The Show's Talking Problem

The hope was that Karan Johar, talk-show host and Internet personality, a filmmaker and producer, would inject some much-needed nakhra—that skip in the stunted step, that forceful wink reeking joy—in the damp squib that Two Much, the talk show hosted by Twinkle Khanna and Kajol, is turning out to be. The hope was that Janhvi Kapoor, Orry’s friend and actor, with her capacity for easy glamour and forced relatability—how she eats with her hands, and reads Ambedkar, and speaks Hindi—would be able to challenge the narrative of the show’s exhausting and dated feminism. Both do their part in the familiar, charming ways they have been consumed in, but perhaps it takes more than a comfortable celebrity to bring a show back from the trenches. 

The talking points—Johar’s fight with his own self-image and Ozempic; his late-blooming sexual renaissance; the surgeries Kapoor has and has not undergone to achieve confected beauty; how her boyfriend looks great riding—are familiar. Both read poetry that they allegedly wrote, in Hindi—one missing a lost mother, the other a love that got away. The exhaustion of being in the public eye, the exhibitionism and the ecstacies of it, too, are brought up. What is new then? 

Some metaphors, perhaps, because wit is an over-written dialogue on this show. Kajol calls Johar Bollywood’s “green chutney and chat masala”, always on the side of the “main platter”—though she is wrong, because Johar has the singular and enviable talent of joyfully turning the spotlight on him, even if it means he gets lit from within—and Khanna, wearing pants that serve as a potent optical illusion,  calls him a “pineapple on a pizza”, for he is either loved or hated—and here, too, she is wrong, because the hate people have for Johar seems vindictive and gleeful, not an innate preference, but a desire to degrade oneself by bathing the heart in acid. The question is not why people hate Johar, but why they love to hate him, something Khanna hints at by calling Johar the “most likeable hated person”—but Johat gets what she is really asking and gives us the familiar, insufficient answer. Koffee With Karan and garden-variety homophobia, which reached a fever pitch in the post-Sushant Singh Rajput nepotism discourse.

I have a theory here—that both Johar and Kapoor are hated because they have simply not been exceptional. That is the price you have to pay to be loved as someone coming from deep pockets of privilege—not modesty, nor self-knowledge, and certainly not relatability, but the sheer, inarguable, blunt force of brilliance. The show never really speaks of their careers, and so never really explores the idea of what this brilliance or even ambition could mean. It is possible to watch it as a stranger to this world and emerge thinking of both as powerful glitteratis, a shrill gathering of warm insiders. 

This show comes alive in the details—even something as banal as Kapoor making scrambled eggs on her scalp, or crushed and old notes being exchanged, feel like the angular couches are not as cold and contrived as they may seem. But the show is structured not for conversation, but a leapfrogging and abstraction, and before anyone settles into the comfortable rhythms of a candid conversation, it is immediately yanked out into another segment or asked to extrapolate on themes. To fragment a talk show requires a host that is able to lift a fragment to its glittering apex, not shard it further by smashing it to the ground. 

I don’t quite think Khanna and Kajol have slipped into their roles as hosts, a faint hangover of their filmography keeps slipping up. The former transcribes every word with her hand, and the latter with her facial muscles—they are playing 90s heroines in a 2020s talk-show. I don’t believe anything they say, any gesture they make—even if it is something like falling into the arms of the other in exhaustion at the end of an episode—hasn’t been workshopped by at least a dozen people. 

Besides, the show has a reverence problem—it believes reverence is a conversation point. It isn’t, as anyone who is famous can tell you. It is a statement that does not ask for a response, that does not engage or excite further conversations. Watching Kapoor as all three fawn over Sridevi is a bit exhausting, and it feels like the show is unable to comprehend that the central thrust of a talk show is … to talk, not be talked at.  

A poignant moment arrives, though, seeing their differing perspectives on fidelity. When Kajol, Khanna, and Johar take a stand that emotional infidelity is worse than physical infidelity, that cheating is a “thand lag rahi thi” shrug, while Kapoor holds physical fidelity as close to her as possible, it is a fascinating glimpse into a world where marriage’s meaning and purpose might have to be negotiated. The three older people look at Kapoor as someone who might have a thing or two to learn about love, not as a feeling, but as labour. The difference in perspective is not a generation gap, but a wisdom gap.

When they say compatibility is more foundational to marriage than love, the question is what compatibility without love looks like is left by the wayside. This was, perhaps, what the show could have been honed towards, had it not been content with being the Indian head-shake of conversations, where topics are raised to be ambiguously dealt with, just enough to know what people actually mean. It wants to talk about infidelity as routine, but does not have the gossipy gumption of actually speaking about how they experienced it. It wants to talk about sexuality, but not name it. It wants to talk of facial surgeries but not pry. Nobody wants a thesis on image consciousness. We are not here to sympathize, but salivate. 

For the talk show is the place for stardom to rest—and by rest, I mean give the illusion of rest, because stardom isn’t a 9-5, an illusion that must feel easy, spontaneous, real, aspirational, feral, and cool. Kapoor and Johar might be patron saints of it. They make it look easy as they speak of its labours. But there is something missing. Watching the assembly line of episodes of Two Much, among other talk shows, the desire to know more about the lives of these actors and celebrities has dulled, if not been decimated. You don’t want to be them. You don’t want to know them. Their vulnerabilities are not aching, and nor are their euphorias infectious. On bad days, they seem like social experiments gone wrong. Is that maturing? Or simply the contemporary failure of the very thing that made cinema shimmer—glamour.