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'Oops! Ab Kya?' Series Review: Watchable but Uninspired Remake of 'Jane the Virgin'
Starring Shweta Basu Prasad, the eight-episode comedy is a middling fusion of tones.
Directors: Debatma Mandal, Prem Mistry
Writers: Devanshi Shah, Suprith Kunder, Ayesha Nair, Chirag Mahabal, Sarjita Jain
Cast: Shweta Basu Prasad, Aashim Gulati, Abhay Mahajan, Sonali Kulkarni, Apara Mehta, Jaaved Jaaferi, Amy Aela
Streaming on: Jio Hotstar
Fortunately, the worst thing about Oops! Ab Kya? is its title. The eight-episode series is an Indian remake of Jane the Virgin, the hit American dramedy centered on the life of a chaste Latina virgin who becomes pregnant after a routine hospital visit turns into an artificial insemination accident.
Oops! Ab Kya? (if I repeat this title enough, maybe it’ll stop sounding terrible) is a serviceable show on its own. It has a decent cast: Shweta Basu Prasad finally gets an author-backed role of sorts, while the supporting gang is gamely led by veterans like Sonali Kulkarni and Jaaved Jaaferi. The young-and-awkward Dice Media aesthetic lends itself naturally to the show’s unserious tone.
For once, the artifice and DIY stagey-ness of its setting aren’t deal breakers. And it helps that the original show aims beyond its one-line gimmick: every character becomes a protagonist of their own little storyline. There’s not much to tell the main dish from the garnish.
But the problem with Oops! Ab Kya? (nearly there) — apart from 40-minute episodes being a stretch for this genre — is that it fails to capture the essence of Jane the Virgin. From whatever little I’ve watched of the Gina Rodriguez-fronted show, it’s clear that satire was its selling point.
Much of it was designed as a spoof of the high-pitched telenovela format; the “badness” became a legitimate language. The cultural flavour came from its self-awareness — here was a Latin American soap opera chuckling at Latin American soap operas.
On paper, Oops! Ab Kya? has a readymade environment. The Hindi ‘TV serial’ (or the Ekta Kapoor-coded K-serial) is a worthy satirical device. Yet, the translation is weak and uneven. It’s not just that the Indian soap opera has been parodied to death in the digital age. It’s also that Oops! Ab Kya? doesn’t do enough with its self-awareness. I think I’ve normalised the title by now.
The religious Latin American family here is a Mumbai-based Gujarati family prone to melodrama. I like the casting of Apara Mehta — the television actress famous for her role as Tulsi’s mother-in-law in the iconic Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi — as protagonist Roohi Jani’s ‘sanskaari’ grandma. The irony works: this god-fearing lady has a Garba-loving daughter, Paakhi (Kulkarni), who got knocked up as a teen and reared Roohi as a single mother.
I also like that the family swear by a long-running serial called “Tere Hone Lage Hai Dobaara,” whose aging star Vanraj (Jaaferi) yearns to be taken seriously as an actor. Vanraj’s role in Roohi’s life makes for the show’s better bittersweet moments. Half an episode is dedicated to a man attempting to win over a daughter he never knew he had — this is far more romantic than the actual romances in the series (this sounded less creepy in my head).
But beyond this, the nods are mostly superficial.
Cringey love triangles, middle-class dreams, failed sexcapades, crime twists, gold-digging wives and scheming mother-in-laws don’t quite feel like subverted TV tropes. At times, it’s hard to tell where the show’s meta-humour ends and where its (misguided) sincerity begins. It’s a formula that’s directly imitated rather than translated. For instance, it’s only ever mentioned in passing that Roohi — a hotel employee impregnated with dashing boss Samar’s (Aashim Gulati) sperm — is an aspiring rom-com writer. It’s not a big part of her identity, even if she’s framed as a bumbling heroine stuck in all the wrong situations.
Her boyfriend of three years, Omkar (Abhay Mahajan), is an intelligence officer whose pursuit of a shadowy drug lord named Mayasur feels like more of a disjointed tangent than a campy Crime Beat-style offshoot. This subplot — which features a few shady murders at the hotel, Samar’s greedy wife Alisha and her past, the constant mentions of Pakistan and Afghanistan smugglers, and the demonisation of the show’s only Muslim character — makes it hard to enjoy the flimsiness of Roohi’s circumstances.
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Netflix’s Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhein is a neat example of long-form satirical storytelling; despite all its knotty and plotty motions, it rarely veered away from its 1990s Bollywood-masculinity subversions and Shah Rukh Khan riffs. Here, it often seems like the gimmick is gatecrashed rather than supplied by the flab. The result: Roohi’s pregnancy and moral conflict are lost in the chaos of a wider template.
The genre jumps from one mood to another, rarely letting us sit with its skit-like nature. The track of Samar and his failing marriage, too, stays stranded between pulp and unwitting intensity. Some of the slapstick ingredients — like Roohi mistakenly delivering a sex letter to the wrong man; and then reading it out in a men’s restroom — don’t land the way they should either. The mother-daughter relationship is supposed to be moving, but save for a handful of well-acted shots, there’s no emotional continuity to the Jani household.
The three generations of women might have made for a neat long-form story on their own, but Oops! Ab Kya?, like so many Hotstar remakes over the years, is allergic to the concept of narrative originality.
The series instead plays up the Gujarati-ness and Marathi-ness of Roohi and Omkar, but Samar Pratap Singh’s lack of texture — a girl coos: “he looks just like Justin Baldoni,” a mistimed nod to the now-infamous Jane the Virgin cast member — is attributed to his ‘South Bombay’ origins and run-of-the-mill richness. Aashim Gulati has that inescapably modern vibe, but it’s so strong that even Salim — Emperor Akbar’s son and the historical character he plays in Taj: Divided By Blood (2023) — became a South Bombay dude.
Perhaps the issue is that Oops! Ab Kya? takes a broader pop-cultural slant.
Its identity as a satire is not limited to desi television and social agency. For example, the male voice-over is generic, bringing to mind a saccharine TVF slice-of-life comedy (incidentally, the analogy used to explain the safeguarding of Roohi’s virginity is a “Gullak”), or a 2000s romcom trying to sound youthful while coming to terms with the idea of urban coolth.
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Roohi uses clumsy cricket analogies early on (“World Cup” it seems). At one point, Vanraj’s argument with Paakhi ends with him fumbling “magar woh…suno toh!” like Saif Ali Khan’s Sameer in Dil Chahta Hai (2001). At another point, a role of a brick wall invokes 100 Days (1991), the Hindi psychological thriller (featuring a young Jaaved Jaaferi) that haunted an entire generation of millennials.
These random references blunt the specificity that allowed Jane the Virgin to weaponise its corniness. The potboiler twists, the staging and the thriller territory towards the end feel bereft of context. One not only forgets about Roohi’s fertile predicament, the show keeps morphing into different spin-offs without any connective tissue. I’m not just saying this for the heck of it.
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I watched the preview screeners in the sequence they appeared in. For some reason, episode 6 played before episode 5, but I remained blissfully oblivious. It made absolutely no difference to my overall viewing experience. That’s the sort of low-investment, low-returns show Oops! Ab Kya? is: a little more than ambient television, a little less than crafty sitcom entertainment.
After realising my mistake, I thought: Oops, now what? So I simply clicked on episode 5, hoping to reverse-engineer my feelings. Needless to mention, my opinion remained static. And it might just stay that way for the next 4 seasons.