‘Taaza Khabar: Season 2’ Review: A Nothingburger of a Sequel

Director: Himank Gaur
Writers: Hussain Dalal, Abbas Dalal, Aziz Dalal
Cast: Bhuvan Bam, Shriya Pilgaonkar, Prathamesh Parab, Deven Bhojani, Jaaved Jaaferi, Shilpa Shukla
Language: Hindi
Streaming on: Disney + Hotstar

Taaza Khabar: Season 1 (2023) ended on a cliffhanger. The rags-to-riches protagonist, Vasant “Vasya” Gawade (Bhuvan Bam), abuses his magical ‘blessing’ — a cellphone app that flashes breaking news headlines before they happen — and goes on a downward spiral. The wealthy Vasya gets power drunk; his friends and family lose trust in him. He falls into trouble with Mumbai’s shady underbelly. The season closes with him seeing a future headline about his own death.

You can tell that the makers didn’t quite think this headline through. But it looks cool, so they did it anyway. Taaza Khabar: Season 2 spends its first few episodes scrambling in all directions to legitimise the cliffhanger; it creaks under the weight of a generational burden. It is revealed that Vasya actually fakes his own death to trick fate (hence the news) and go underground. Most of his loved ones — his old parents, his lover Madhu (Shriya Pilgaonkar), and his friend Mehboob (Deven Bhojani) — genuinely believe he’s gone. Their grief is real. (Never mind that the show’s skit-like production value means no corpse is visible on the funeral pyre.) It’s a Sherlock-style season opening. The only difference is that the writing here reverse-engineers, engineers, heaves and crumbles under the pressure of the gimmick. Vasya is forced out of hiding by his father’s health scare and, just like that, his elaborate plan is ruined. His death accomplished nothing. It feels like the most random detour because the series then continues like it never happened.

That’s just the sort of all-vibes series Taaza Khabar: Season 2 is. It’s like watching a game show contestant consistently choosing the least appealing options. If the first door has a Ferrari behind it, and the second has the keys to a new house, trust Taaza Khabar: Season 2 to look behind the third — only to find a long and dark corridor to nowhere. For instance, the possibilities are endless with the phone app. It’s a solid hook. Think of all the exciting narrative paths available: vigilantism, religion (a godman perhaps?), political supremacy, journalism, share markets, romance, or heck, even simple Internet fame for being a soothsayer.

But the series stays allergic to any kind of cultural complexity. Sports betting — a racket around the miraculous 2019 Men’s Cricket World Cup final — is as far as it goes. The second season tries to get funky with more headlines and get-rich-quick schemes that feature whale vomit, priceless injections on a crashed cargo plane (“This is India,” Vasya’s best friend Peter informs the dying white pilot), bitcoin accounts on memory cards found in goat shit, fake paintings, antique deals and drug shipments. There’s a lot of timeline trickery, forced Mumbaiya slang, awkward cussing, philosophy-for-dummies dialogue and distracting camerawork (starring a spiral-staircase shot and a Veer-Zaara-style circular reunion shot). But it all adds up to result in a greasy nothingburger. The series often plays out like the OTT equivalent of a Salman Khan entertainer; the filmmaking is complacent because it counts solely on the presence of a (YouTube) superstar.

Most of all, this entire season has a bewildering rinse-repeat tone: a new villain named Yusuf (Jaaved Jaaferi), who lost a fortune (and ‘izzat’) during the betting debacle, keeps threatening Vasya and gang to cough up the money with interest. In every episode, he alters the number. He takes Vasya’s parents hostage, puts them under surveillance, and keeps reminding Vasya that the clock is ticking. Vasya cooks up new ways to repay the debt, while also desensitising our reading of money (1,000 crores starts to sound like 1 lakh). Every permutation of this plot happens over six episodes. That's all there is. Yusuf is introduced as a sinister power broker who kills at will but is very talkative and tolerant with Vasya. He can finish them off whenever he pleases, as is evident from the cold openings that revolve around his past. One of the episodes begins with Yusuf killing his mentor as 1970s-style revenge for a childhood tragedy. It’s such a no-context murder that it makes his mildness around Vasya look stranger.

When Yusuf isn’t waving a gun, Vasya is seen repeating the godly line “mere ko vardaan hai (I am blessed)” in different volumes. He carries this habit on from the first season, except this time, he’s humbled by his downfall and allegedly focuses on protecting his people. Bam’s performance makes it hard to tell the difference. You can’t fault him for effort, but Taaza Khabar is a one-note franchise that does far less than his YouTube productions (BB Ki Vines and Dhindora) to channel his talent. At times, it appears as though Vasya is playing Bhuvan Bam and not vice versa. It also looks like the cast is imitating classic Bombay cinema instead of being original characters in a story beset by magic realism. Every lifeless setting hides behind its ode to Bollywood fiction.

The climax of this season of Taaza Khabar unfolds in a burning building that contains children and cocaine (in no particular order), but it’s hard to care. The stakes don't matter. The lack of intricacy is such that even the bulbs rigged to light a scene in a bus are visible. When all else fails, there’s always a slow-motion shot of Vasya smoking and thinking in an uneven accent. When this fails, too, there’s always a software update that’ll widen the destiny game. But I don’t need an app to predict that the next season will be more of the same. Or that I might write a silly pun about the title (‘stale headlines’ or ‘broken news’). I do need an app, however, to tell me who will win Wimbledon next year. Only, I’m just not sure if my four-year-old phone has enough memory to support the app. I am not so blessed.