‘Mistry’ Series Review: Ram Kapoor Stars in This Uninspiring Remake of ‘Monk’

I remember binge-watching Monk back in the day. It wasn’t at the top of my American-sitcom-comfort-viewing list (Scrubs and Frasier were), but I was a Peter Sellers fan looking for the next Pink Panther-coded legacy. I was also curious about Tony Shalhoub’s Emmy-winning performance as an OCD-afflicted detective with all sorts of tics and phobias. Shalhoub was an uncanny mix of funny and sad, turning Monk into an oddball portrait of a grieving husband whose trauma became his superpower.

Mistry is a scene-by-scene Hindi remake of Monk, starring Ram Kapoor as Armaan Mistry, a neurotic former Mumbai cop who is regularly roped in by the Crime Branch so that he can declare “the case is cracked” before the end of every episode. Mistry’s assistant-cum-nurse is single mother Sharanya (Shikha Talsania), who follows him around with wet wipes and hand sanitizers, protecting the man from himself while aiding his ‘freelance’ career. Of all the Hotstar adaptations so far, Mistry is perhaps the most uninspired one yet. I feel like I’ve written this line in a previous review before, but such is the business of long-form remakes. The lack of originality isn’t a problem — that’s just the nature of the beast, and who am I to question the commerce of conveyor-belt storytelling? Mistry is likely for anyone who hasn’t seen Monk, and unfortunately for those who have, the comparisons are crippling.

But the focus on being physically faithful to the original overrides any prospect of cultural translation. Apart from the odd movie reference — a Bollywood-crazy hotel security head cites Baazigar and Drishyam to help Mistry locate a missing body; a politician's wife is so off-put by the detective’s eccentricities that she derisively calls him ‘Laal Singh Chaddha’; or the surname Mistry sounding phonetically similar to “mystery” — the identity of this show is largely derivative. The 8-episode season cherry-picks cases (which, in terms of intrigue, land between ‘No Sh*t Sherlock’ and ‘Elementary My Dear Watson’) from the 13-episode opening season of Monk. Despite a totally different setting and context, the specifics are so alike that each episode has an “original teleplay” credit for the American writers. The ideas are retained, but the spirit is counterfeited.

Instead of highlighting the weird detective’s intelligence, the series chooses to dumb everyone else down — Sharanya, Crime Branch boss and Mistry’s ex-colleague Sehmat (Mona Singh), her sub-inspector (a very watchable Kshitish Date), any suspects or witnesses — to make Mistry look smarter. It’s a fine line, of course, but the conceit is obvious. At some point, Sehmat even disappears for a few episodes (“bike accident”), almost as if it’s atoning for the sin of wasting a solid actor like Mona Singh in a thankless role. For a show about details, it’s a bit ironic the character arcs are bereft of detail: for instance, Sehmat is introduced as a smoker (because Mistry deduces her stress levels), but she shows no signs of it for the next seven episodes. The cases are simple because they’re designed to trigger Mistry’s personality traits and his many twitches, but the patterns of cheating spouses and class rage are hard to ignore. The writing is safe and incurious, to such an extent that most characters look desensitised to death, loss and the concept of crime itself. Nobody really reacts the way humans usually do. I get that it’s a comedy, but the emotional gravity of Mistry is supposed to be rooted in his ability to empathise in spite of himself. His grief is too neatly compartmentalised as well. Regardless of the stakes, every episode ends with Mistry missing his wife and doing his own investigation into her murder.

In an era of true-crime fatigue and an overdose of moody crime thrillers, a tragicomedy like Mistry already has a starting advantage. But not disliking it isn’t the same as liking — or enjoying — it. Most episodes are 10 minutes too long, and the routine of Mistry taking up a case, playing the fool and then surprising everyone with his genius (“the case is cracked” is just an annoying punchline) becomes repetitive. A show like this also depends heavily on the performances. The extended cast features familiar faces like Shishir Sharma, Inayat Sood, Gagan Dev Riar, Shrishti Dixit and others across different cases. The casting is fine, but the overall staging of the series is such that everyone appears to be roleplaying a fantasy to ‘cure’ Armaan Mistry (I’m looking at you, Maine Gandhi Ko Nahi Maara) and bring him out of his stupor. At times, some of the suspects behave so inertly after losing a partner or accidentally killing someone that you can’t tell if it’s the acting or the acting within the acting.

To his credit, Ram Kapoor doesn’t try to imitate Tony Shalhoub — he plays Armaan Mistry in his own idiosyncratic manner. But he does what several Indian performers have done before him; he pitches an anxiety disorder so high that it falls under the broader cinematic umbrella of “madness”. It’s a difficult role to pull off, especially when the look-so-quirky background score insists that we laugh at him before trying to understand him. Kapoor overcooks the hand gestures and the inflections, almost as if he’s miming his thoughts while expressing them. Often, Mistry’s mysophobia makes him look like more of a privileged SoBo guy who can’t handle normie life away from his humidifier-controlled mansion (think of a young Rohan Raichand going “eww so tacky” in Chandni Chowk in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham).

But there are times when Kapoor really internalises the character’s compulsions — particularly when Mistry spots a creased collar, a book out of alignment, a soiled floor or food crumbs on a table. He can’t help but be hyper-aware. The reactions to him range from amusement and impatience to complete exasperation. It’s the kind of reaction that casual moviegoers reserve for the ones who complain about wrong aspect ratios, bright cell-phone screens, bad projection and malfunctioning lights in a cinema hall. It’s also the kind of reaction that casual readers reserve for nitpicky film critics who notice a sync or dubbing issue, a continuity glitch, an out-of-focus shot, a lazy transition, or worse, an entire series on autopilot.