'Rangeen’ Series Review: A Black Comedy That’s Too Busy Admiring Itself

Imagine a group of strangers launching a Sunday book club. They begin enthusiastically — discovering each other’s tastes, comfort levels, sense of humour, personality and general vibe. Sometimes, they do drinks later and tease each other’s choices (“Sally Rooney? You’re such a hipster”). The possibilities are endless. Then one of them misses a Sunday; the balance is off. Two more drop out the next week. The plan-maker is gone soon. The energy fades. The discussions morph into dull rambles; sometimes, sentences and thoughts start only to get lost along the way. Finally, two members remain; one of them quotes J.K. Rowling. They sit in silence and scroll through their phones until their cabs arrive. They search for a “books to hold performatively in public spaces” list.

Rangeen is this book club — united by passion, dismantled by time. The nine-episode series starts with hope. A talented crew, led by Vineet Kumar Singh (in pre-Chhaava mode) and Rajshri Deshpande (Trial by Fire); even Mismatched star Taaruk Raina isn’t miscast like he was in The Waking of A Nation. A solid setup: a self-righteous Hindi scribe named Adarsh (Singh) catches his wife Naina (Deshpande) with a young gigolo (Raina, as Sunny), and their marriage breaks down. The series more or less opens with this incident, so one is left to trace the language of their companionship through their conflict — no happy flashbacks, no spoon-feeding, just resentment and bad decisions and silence.

The narrative becomes three-pronged: Adarsh lashes out like a jilted husband; Naina retreats to her parents’ home; Sunny struggles to keep his male-escort gig afloat. Even the idea is worthy: Adarsh (“ideal”) sets out on the most un-ideal journey to prove his masculinity, Naina is beset by the guilt of cheating on the classic Good Guy that society reveres (he’s right for her by virtue of not being wrong), and Sunny’s entanglement with this couple leads to a ‘career crisis’ of sorts. But the problem — and ultimate undoing of the proverbial bookclub — is that Rangeen chooses to be a black comedy.

There’s nothing wrong with the genre per se, but if there’s one thing Indian long-form streaming has shown in the last few years, it’s that this tone is almost impossible to sustain across a whole season. The novelty disappears in a couple of episodes, the writing panics, a formula is settled on, and the series then resembles an endless conveyor belt of quirky-dark scenes that are loosely connected to each other. More importantly, it’s always the “comedy” part — the colourful padding of a narrative required to make it more accessible — that becomes the narrative itself. It’s the equivalent of a disguise turning into the default identity.

Perhaps this is the point of Rangeen, given that the title itself translates to “colourful”. But the series gets so indulgent with these shades that it entirely forgets — and overlooks — the motive of the story: a middle-class couple torn apart by egos and sexual incompatibility. Adarsh’s first reaction is to slut-shame his wife and attack the man she’s with, yet his duality — a truth-seeking journalist whose view of love is oddly patriarchal — is left unexplored. It reminded me of the recent Aap Jaisa Koi, but at least that was a feature-length film. Rangeen’s diversions hijack our attention for approximately 8 hours, until it’s virtually unrecognisable from the show it started as.

It goes thus: Adarsh decides to become a gigolo himself, taking Sunny’s help, ‘training’ under his boss-ma’am (Sheeba Chaddha) and experiencing different kinds of clients that are supposed to project the various spectrums of female desire. (Somewhere in there, there’s a joke about the dire state of modern journalism and a need for ‘side hustles’). You can see why Adarsh makes this weird choice — he wants to show Naina that he’s a man’s man too — but it’s rarely clear why he continues to pursue it for months without direction. His search for masculinity is used as more of a gimmick. Much like the show itself, he gets addicted to his own coping mechanism. For reference, imagine if the first paragraph of this review keeps going on and becomes the entire review.

Even if the intent is to explore the social angle and let the three characters be the tragicomic protagonists of their own fate, at no point are we urged to remember the broader picture: Adarsh and Naina are responding to the history of their own marriage, they miss one another (in spurts), and Sunny is struggling to process his own evolution (and erectile dysfunction). It kind of reflects the distinctly Indian habit of avoiding ‘difficult’ or uncomfortable topics through humour and escapism. In that sense, Rangeen is Prime’s Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper (Netflix); it over-reaches far and wide to entertain, only to lose track of its original purpose. Everything feels like an algorithmic attempt to stay interesting: the eclectic background score, Adarsh’s many married-client adventures (a 24-year-old party-girl; the animal-trafficking wife of a convict; a stately woman looking for a sub); random encounters with a crocodile, pig and scamsters at a shady hotel; and Sunny’s digressive quest to regain his mojo (including a psychedelic night with a rich couple into cuckolding).

Ironically, the series appears unsure of how to deal with Naina, her trauma and the morality of their situation. The few nice touches — like her parents automatically assuming that the husband’s mistake must have caused their rift; or Adarsh approaching each ‘subject’ with journalistic curiosity — are swallowed by the jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none storytelling. It doesn’t help that the word “gigolo” is mentioned approximately 1431 times, as if it’s an SEO tactic. It also doesn’t help that a fine actor like Vineet Kumar Singh — for whom this is, in theory, the perfect showcase — isn’t allowed to construct Adarsh into a sum of his parts. It’s the adventures-of template, where the emotional continuity of the character is secondary to the volume of the moment. With some, he is a small-town simpleton; with others, he’s a charmer. The details are jarring, too: Adarsh is a chain-smoker, but the cigarettes often look like they’re forced into scenes to offset the lack of action. His smoking becomes a chore. A finer actor like Rajshri Deshpande is wasted as Naina, a woman reduced to a stereotype who blissfully says “I don’t know, go straight for now” when an auto driver asks for a destination (the Hindi version of Dakota Johnson’s “I’m going home” line from How to be Single).

An issue with Rangeen is its reluctance to commit. No specific setting is mentioned (leading me to squint my eyes at number plates in some shots). The cultural diversity of the story — like Sunny coming from a family of butchers; or an elegant Muslim client reacting to Adarsh’s ‘attar’ — is shrouded in a safety-first anonymity. One might justify this by claiming that the series is built on themes of secrecy and invisibilised desires, but it robs Rangeen of its relevance. This extends to the way it doesn’t commit to the urges of those who hire Adarsh’s services. It’s as if the series is shy about the very repression it platforms. The woman who ‘punishes’ Adarsh, for instance, is revealed to be a broken wife who does it to understand her own marriage. The couple who hire Sunny (the husband wants to watch the gigolo get it on with his wife) stop short of admitting it’s a kink.

In short, the humanisation of sex feels like a cop out. Rangeen does everything to avoid confessing that it can simply be a primal need. Eventually, they all serve as instruments of Adarsh’s awakening — an awakening that suddenly remembers he was, or is, an editor of a dying newspaper. In fact, the last two episodes unfold with sad ballads, abrupt epiphanies and filmy dialogue. The uneven tonality is a symptom of how the series fumbles the medium: filling space, wandering and drifting about for ages before circling back to the point. Rangeen isn’t badly made, it’s just a reminder that even unconventional themes can be generic; that even courage can be sanitised. After all, a book club is doomed if everyone was just pretending to be a reader.