‘The Pickle Factory’ Series Review: Tanya Maniktala, Ritwik Bhowmik Star In A Dull and Immature Workplace Comedy

Director: Vishwajoy Mukherjee
Writers: Mohak Pajni, Adhiraj Sharma, Saransh Sharma
Cast: Tanya Maniktala, Ritwik Bhowmik, Sohaila Kapur, Gagan Dev Riar, Naveen Kaushik, Ritika Murthy, Parag Chadha, Akashdeep Arora
Streaming on: Waves OTT App

The Pickle Factory is what happens when The Office (U.S.) and Better Life Foundation (India) reluctantly get married (arranged) and have a pious, Doordarshan-loving child that refuses to grow up. It’s the kind of stagey and adolescent workplace comedy that went out of fashion years ago. You want it to work, of course, for several reasons. The 10-episode show revolves around the quirky employees of a family-run pickle company; imagine the readymade Hindi ‘achaar’ proverbs.

The cast is quite promising as well. Ritwik Bhowmik is fresh off the success of Bandish Bandits Season 2; Gagan Dev Riar broke through as master scammer Abdul Karim Telgi in Scam 2003: The Telgi Story; watching Naveen Kaushik in a modest homegrown company brings back memories of his scene-stealing role as Nitin in Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year (2009). There’s also the production company, Dice Media, one of the first movers in the Indian streaming space; viral hit Little Things aside, the recent Ghar Waapsi (2022) marked a proper evolution of mid-budget, urban storytelling.

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But The Pickle Factory remains frustratingly low on genre humour and feel-goodness. The framework is a flimsier version of Ghar Waapsi’s. A 20-something MBA graduate, Mahika (Tanya Maniktala), loses her big-city job and becomes an intern at The Pickle Factory (TPF), her grandmother Leela’s thriving little business back in her hometown. Everyone at TPF is a character with a capital C. Leela’s two adult sons — step-brothers Chandu (Kaushik) and Jojo (Riar) — have a Jim-and-Dwight vibe going on. There’s the resident glutton, Mala (Ritika Murthy), who allows my personal favourite snack (Ratlami sev) to make its small-screen debut. There’s the straight-laced nerd (Parag Chadha), the Gen Z-coded slacker (Akashdeep Arora) and the good-looking quality control guy, Deb (Bhowmik), whose childhood crush on Mahika continues to persevere. I’m sure I missed someone, but it doesn’t really matter. The show doesn’t afford any of them the situational agency or pop-cultural wit to be memorable.

The Pickle Factory looks uncomfortable with the dimensions of the genre. The camera work has a mockumentary style (with those abrupt zooms and pans) without any reason; it’s not like a fictional documentary crew is following the employees and their lives. You almost expect the characters to break the fourth wall, so when they don’t, it looks strange. A ‘Next’ slate appears over the dying moments of every episode even though it’s not a montage of things to come. The business — and criminally, the variety of delicious-looking regional pickles — remains more about distribution and sales than production and culinary passion. New and eccentric clients pop up every other day, but you can sense that the writing struggles to keep all the characters occupied at once. Some of the primary threads dominate episodes while the secondary ones are often weaker. For instance, an episode revolving around Leela’s kitty party and a kheer incident forces in a background character’s breakup and a petty rivalry just so that all combinations of faces are sorted. At another point, two characters are relegated to the generator room during a power cut so that the others can win over a client in the office. An episode features Jojo’s plan to nab those who dented his car, but the parallel track of a missing bank cheque is an afterthought.

The awkward execution feels like a get-what-you-pay-for aesthetic. It’s one of those early-OTT traits, where the makers count on us noticing the low-stakes filmmaking so that our expectations stay in check. But this can still be done effectively, like Better Life Foundation — or Dice Media’s own Not Fit — proved a decade ago. All it needs is a fuller understanding of the space, where the DIY treatment feeds the satirical tone instead of derailing it. A lot of it is designed as a sanitised sitcom-meets-soap-television product. It lacks the bite of observational comedy. The visual punchlines are childish — like a cold opening starting with the men bickering after a cricket match only for their opponents to be revealed as a team of 12-year-olds. Cue clownish sound effect. There’s a gag of Chandu reading a love letter to his former school teacher only for her to correct his grammar. It works on paper; it’s a nice anecdote. But the execution fails to get the tragicomic nature of his character. It tries to be funny instead of funny and sad.

One of the key symptoms of The Pickle Factory being a misfit is its dated sense of timing and cultural appropriation. A table-tennis game inevitably invites a ‘Made in China’ and Forrest Gump joke. A cocky nemesis is taught a lesson by Leela when she pulls out the big guns by complaining to his wife. Chandu’s Russian business partner is shady, makes ‘Stalin eggs’ and runs a smuggling racket under the guise of an adult-diaper company. A starving-children-in-Africa pun is imminent every time Mala is seen stuffing her face. A raging dandruff problem is described by Jojo as “my hair has become the Middle East”. A skin-whitening cream prompts a Tom Alter reference. And the most semi-offensive of them: “If we record our labour and submit it to the Academy, they’ll give us an Oscar thinking it’s a slavery movie”. The only half-decent one is when somebody calls a lotus-stem pickle a “right-wing achaar”. I suppose the title of the show is unintentionally accurate. The word “Factory” makes sense, because much of it feels like a data point produced by an algorithm. And the “Pickle” in there refers more to a self-inflicted predicament than a tasty relish.