‘The Ba***ds of Bollywood’ Series Review: Aryan Khan Gets His Revenge

In the pre-social media era, Bollywood movies about Bollywood movies were more concerned with the culture of film-making. Be it the spoofy excesses of Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om or the playful curiosity of Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance, the Bombay industry — creative cameos, self-referential dialogue, colourful characters, on-set adventures — was merely a stepping-off point for the stories. However, this genre is very different in the digital age. It’s now concerned with the industry and the average viewer’s perception of it; it’s more alive to the internet than the world we live in. The storytelling rides the coattails of reddit-coded gossip, controversies, self-aware humour, sly potshots and guess-the-celebrity rumours. So the N-word (nepotism) and the M-word (meta) become everything. The problem is that this gimmick is hard to sustain in the long format. Shows like The Fame Game and Showtime stumbled after the winks wore off. 

The Ba***ds of Bollywood is the latest entry in this canon. It starts off with a shaky episode. The cameos and nods flow thick and fast; the jokes don’t land; the staging is clumsy; the access-filmmaking overwhelms the execution. For those familiar with the ways of the business, the innuendos aren’t shocking. ‘Delhi outsider’ Aasmaan Singh (a reliable Lakshya Lalwani) is the newest hero in Bollywood after delivering a surprise hit for a legacy studio called Sodawallah Productions. Boss Freddy Sodawallah (a gloriously hammy Manish Chaudhari) gaslights the youngster into a 3-film contract, but Dharma boss Karan Johar gets fascinated by his arrogance after he appears on a newcomers’ roundtable and does a Siddhant Chaturvedi on a snooty nepo-kid named Karishma (Sahher Bambba). In a decision that has nothing to do with Gehraiyaan, Johar pulls off an edgy casting coup of Aasmaan and Karishma — except her chain-smoking superstar dad, Ajay Talwar (Bobby Deol), is against this pairing.

A still from ‘Ba***ds of Bollywood’

Ajay wants his daughter out of the Dharma launch (who would have thought?); Freddy wants to cast Ajay for the sequel of their superhit (“Sailaab 2”) that saved his company; things get hairy when Aasmaan and Karishma hit it off like teenagers searching for chemistry. Besides all the celebrities who play looney-tunes versions of themselves (not Ranveer Singh’s best bit), the assortment of characters who get involved are Aasmaan’s Gully Boy-lite bestie Parvaiz (a scene-stealing Raghav Juyal), his manager Sanya (Anya Singh), his background-singer uncle Avtaar (Manoj Pahwa), his kindly mom Neeta (Mona Singh), and a tragicomic has-been named Jaraj Saxena (Rajat Bedi parodying his five minutes of Koi Mil Gaya fame). 

Despite its meta fatigue and OTT patterns, The Ba***ds of Bollywood works better than others in the genre because it feels more personalised. The context of its creator Aryan Khan — son of Shah Rukh Khan and a first-time director — is inextricable from our engagement with the show. Given all that we’ve known and seen of him over the years, the seven-episode satire operates at two levels. The surface layer is the in-jokey and campy pastiche of the industry that Farah Khan comedies would excel at. ‘Serial kisser’ Emraan Hashmi appears as a last-minute intimacy coordinator for the lead couple; Juyal turns Parvaiz’s fanboying over Hashmi into the gag of the series. Aamir Khan and S.S. Rajamouli look like geniuses discussing cinema from a distance, but they’re actually debating about idli-sambhar and vada-pav. Salman Khan mutters “bullshit party” at a friend’s daughter’s lavish birthday dinner. Shah Rukh “Baadshah” Khan’s ego is destroyed not once but twice at an awards ceremony.

There’s more. Nominated actors Rajkummar Rao and Arjun Kapoor do an Abhishek Bachchan-and-Akshay Kumar bit from Om Shanti Om. Karan Johar leans into his perceived image and warns Aasmaan: “Don’t f*ck with the movie mafia”. The heroine’s legendary dad and the hero’s sweet dad convey the duality of the director’s own superstar father. An underworld don comes out of hiding and shoots dead a guy who sings his name in his intro theme. Maheep Kapoor tells her frowning daughter Shanaya “don’t behave like Aryan” on the red carpet. A manager is repeatedly mocked for not carrying a pen. The skit-like tone doesn’t always hit the spot, but the intent is not all empty calories. 

Because every now and then, this surface layer is punctured by something sharper. There’s evidence that the send-up of the Hindi film industry is more of a middle finger than a thumbs up; the satire is more angry than affectionate. It almost aligns with the general skewering of Bollywood and its players in the last few years. The irony is that it employs the incestuousness and privilege of the same system to condemn their ways. For instance, a “Say No to Drugs” line is followed by a ‘Directed by Aryan Khan’ slate. An NCB officer who’s a dead ringer for Sameer Wankhede acts like a cartoon (“Bollywood is druggist!”) while raiding a swanky pub. A cop assures a locked-up star that “jail makes people more famous”. Karishma’s bratty brother screams, “I hate these poor servants”, and then furiously masturbates to VR avatars of them. The superstar keeps cursing his son under his breath. A gangster abducts a star to make him read his daughter’s script. A studio head kicks a female production designer in the stomach because “I don’t raise my hand on women”. An old-school producer indulges in nasty banter (“girls waited outside my door and moaned Me Too!”) while downing his nth drink. An actor locks his daughter in the study of their Bandra mansion after she uncovers his lies. A superstar’s family is eventually revealed to be broken and performative. 

A still from ‘Ba***ds of Bollywood’

 If the first layer indicts the people behind the movies, the second layer of The Ba***ds of Bollywood prosecutes the movies themselves. The clincher is that, up until the climax, the show looks like another fond homage to all the commercial cinema that we — and the makers — have grown up watching. The shades might be modern, but the templates are vintage. There’s a Luck By Chance-coded origin story of a star. There’s the defiant romance between a dreamer and an heiress. There’s the girl’s Amrish Puri-coded father who is vehemently against their love. There’s a wordy Mohabbatein-style exchange between a lover and a hater of love. There’s a Gully Boy-core buddy movie and a How I Met Your Mother-inspired slapping gag. There’s a Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham riff in a funeral with the collective lighting of a pyre (including a Muslim hand). There’s the sad-smiley walk of a hero when her engagement is announced in front of him. There’s an action-packed elopement and chase. And there’s the DDLJ-style declaration of the man refusing to marry his soulmate without her father’s permission.

When the twist arrives, though, it’s so audacious that it upends all the reverence and goofiness we assumed the show was staging. It plays out like a punchline to an awkward but entertaining joke. The title suddenly makes sense. It then occurs to us that we don’t see a single movie being shot during the series: just folks talking and scheming and training and bickering about contracts and loyalties. All those movie tributes deliberately feel hollow. It implies that even Bollywood stories might be a sham if the people telling them care for everything but the actual film-making; all those tropes are fragile if the real spectacle stems from hidden agendas and power struggles. The revelation also lends shape to the show’s over-the-top performances — particularly Bobby Deol’s pulpy fusion of the generic and the specific. The CGI fun and product-placement games are just the entry point, because beneath them lies the sort of biting commentary you don’t usually get from insiders. Khan’s technical prowess has some way to go, but there’s a voice that conceals something darker and truer. The epiphany lies in the eyes of the (hyper-aware) beholder. After all, one person’s ‘Ballads of Bollywood’ is another’s ‘Bastards of Bollywood’.