‘Bandwaale’ Series Review: A Bland and Dusty Musical Comedy

For 8 impossibly long episodes, Bandwaale invents different ways to be forgettable. The musical dramedy is no Bandish Bandits (I’m no fan but that’s the genre bar), but to be fair, it doesn’t really try. The premise is almost reverse-engineered to justify its dearth of personality. Created by composer-filmmaker Ankur Tewari and writer-actor Swanand Kirkire, the series stages the modernity-versus-tradition conflict through a tiresome template: a small-town girl strives to break free with a little help from her friends. It’s a bit like seeing the alt-reality story of Simran from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge — there’s only the million-and-fifth reference at yet another railway station; an oppressive father; a spunky kid sister — except her liberation is not love but art. Mariam (Shalini Pandey) is a covert poetess who uploads her work online so that she can go viral before her textbook-patriarch dad (Ashish Vidyarthi) marries her off to an eligible bachelor. Along the way, she finds two unlikely male allies: an outdated brass-band singer unwilling to evolve (Swanand Kirkire, as Robo), and a hunky-and-aloof DJ (Zahan Kapoor, as Psy) with a penchant for remixes.

First, it’s a rivalry, then a one-sided love triangle, then a coming-of-age comedy, then a family drama, then a social entertainer, then a gender empowerment piece, then it’s just ambient television that totally alienates the viewer in its pursuit of staying light and unhurried. I did a day's worth of chores across its dry 45-minute episodes. Yet at no point did Bandwaale ever feel like a narrative that cared for music beyond a cursory sound or three. The protagonist is an aspiring poet, sure, but she’s not very good. Her poetry is the kind of stuff that would rarely make it beyond an Instagram creative by someone who’s still discovering how to think and write in Hindi to impress a new demographic. Either the show knows this and therefore slots Mariam in the influencer-wordsmith category (an online-sensation contest called “Book My Sitara” is the goal), where she doesn’t have to be great to be popular. Or the show is in denial about her (lack of) ability, given how the only thing that seems to be stopping her from being widely heard is the packaging: she needs Psy to add the beats, and Robo to add the Bappi-Lahiri-esque showmanship.

Actually I’m not sure what exactly her art form is. It’s a strange hybrid of depthless slam poetry and teenybopper lyricism: a Gen-Z version of the dance-storytelling-troupe from Dil To Pagal Hai. It’s hard to trust the premise when its idea of art itself is so reductive. If anything, it’s an unwitting primer on how mediocrity is designed to thrive in an algorithm-driven and caption-heavy landscape. Anyone can write anything. Surely a few stanzas on the moon being an aunt can’t be enough. Or maybe it is. I’m just old and cranky. The concept of Psy and Robo representing the co-existence of old and new in Mariam’s journey is nice. I also like that her big moment on the stage doesn’t go as planned. She’s a young woman from an orthodox Malayali-Christian family, so her dream is more to overcome the patriarchy of the family than succeed at something she’s passionate about. But the show isn’t equipped to explore any of their talent in an immersive and convincing manner. Every other scene has a first-draft vibe, lacking either a vibrant score or a sense of urgency. Most of the humour doesn’t land, except one amateur Robo rap that brings to mind those corny 1990s-Devang Patel hits.

The intent is not so much to replicate a small-town atmosphere as it is to pad up a storyline with 6 hours worth of muted colour. It doesn’t help that the three of them don’t unite till the 6th episode, stretching the individual arcs for so long that there’s nothing left to milk. Robo has the more compelling life, given that he struggles for relevance in a fading ‘family business’ and a place that’s done with his voice. But most of his scenes with his quirky bandmates are overwritten and undercooked at once. Psy is the mysterious hustler for a while, and his bond with Mariam is poorly paced, but his character has a left-of-field turn so random that it serves no purpose except for Zahan Kapoor showcasing some gravity. Mariam’s strict father David is one of those characters who’s made to be so unlikable that redemption is no longer an option. It’s a conventional portrait of a small-minded and egoistic man who sees his daughter as a product; it wastes a veteran like Ashish Vidyarthi in the sort of role that ‘80s B-movies left behind. Mariam’s mother spends the first few episodes staring painfully at her husband, before the writing overcompensates and fleshes her out almost too elaborately.

The performances are nothing to write home about, even though a competent Shalini Pandey continues to resemble Alia Bhatt in uncanny ways. One of the problems is that the characters behave like different people in separate scenes. There’s no transition, despite all the screen-time in the world. Uneven emotional continuity is a problem in long-form storytelling; it’s like these people rarely inherit their previous selves between threads. Mariam has to keep alternating between her tense-home-situation self (where her toxic dad is away in Kerala playing the victim to get a suitable match) and her music-and-lyrics self (where her trauma ‘inspires’ her to pen basic lines and expect instant fame). The balance is clumsy at best, and the situational humour — where Mariam and friends must outwit the father and race against time to save her double life — is bland.

One of the bright spots is her younger sister Cynthia (Sanjana Dipu), who evokes the spirit of Shweta Basu Prasad’s Khadija in Iqbal. She’s a sensible teen stuck in a whirlwind of curated adult chaos. But her influence is sacrificed at the altar of a church-set climax that’s hard to watch for how heavy-handed it is. Without giving too much away, let’s just say it made me allergic to “Knock Knock” jokes. Another merit is the choice of setting: the town of Ratlam. It’s relatively unexplored ground for a mainstream story, and not an episode goes by without a person speaking of its cultural idiosyncrasies. The place doesn’t register as a character, despite all these literal reminders. Perhaps it isn’t meant to. The overall blandness of Bandwaale forced me to romanticise my own link with Ratlam during one of its many quasi-dramatic stretches. My favourite snack is Ratlami sev; I even dug into a packet while watching, in the misguided hope that perhaps the spice in my mouth will extend to the screen. But no such thing happened. Early on, an NRI at a party mentions how Ratlam to him is only a station (remember Jab We Met?) that briefly arrives when passengers are asleep in the middle of the night. I can’t think of a more appropriate metaphor to describe the show.