‘The Roshans’ Series Review: When Nonfiction Behaves Like Fiction 

Director: Shashi Ranjan
Genre: Documentary series
Streaming on: Netflix

You’ve heard of “Prestige TV”: the term for quality long-form film-making, cinematic production values, A-list acting and complex screenwriting. But in the Netflix non-fiction universe, Prestige TV is a far more literal term. It stands for self-produced and self-congratulatory celebrity documentaries with infinite access that explore the sanitised prestige of fame. The symptoms: prestigious movie and music legacies, prestigious anecdotes, prestigious lives, prestigious prestige. You get the gist. Or maybe you didn’t.

Think of the line from Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006): “Making something disappear isn’t enough, you have to bring it back”. This hagiographic genre is all about bringing things back. Some call it the magic of movies, others call it a nostalgia grab.

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It started with The Romantics (2023), the ‘masala’ docu-series about Yash Raj Films (YRF) whose main draw was a rare Aditya Chopra interview. Descendants include Angry Young Men, and the S.S. Rajamouli and Honey Singh documentaries. Even though it sounds like a saucy reality show about the everyday adventures of a film family (“RRR: Rise Roshan Rule”), The Roshans is more of a formal vanity project masquerading as a history lesson. Its four parts span three generations of Roshan men. It’s essentially four separate celebrity episodes that happen to be genetically connected.

Hrithik Roshan along with Rajesh and Rakesh Roshan.

The first revolves around Roshan Lal Nagrath, the technically-gifted musician who infused Hindustani classical and folk rhythms into post-partition Hindi songs. The second and third revolve around his two sons: Bollywood music director Rajesh Roshan and actor-turned-hit-director Rakesh Roshan. The fourth, of course, features Rakesh’s son Hrithik Roshan and his once-in-a-lifetime rise to superstardom. They all share the same galaxy of talking heads and adulatory voices — which seems to involve half the film industry.

As someone with a fragile understanding of music, I found the first two episodes appealing in terms of history and craft. The colourful life and career of Roshan — as told through the eyes of storymakers ranging from Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Javed Akhtar to Asha Bhosle and the late Ameen Sayani — scratches the surface of the 1950s and 1960s soundscapes. Yet, it’s always nice to hear of an important artist from those who were influenced (and created) by him.

One might even forgive the cringe recreations of vintage Bombay. A sepia filter does not a period make, especially if Altos and i10s are visible in the not-so-blurry background. I get the push for visual diversity, but what is this Indian docu-coded need to ruin perfectly good anecdotes by literally showing them?

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Reimagining an era needn’t be a physical act; an innovatively used archival photo or a sound clip provides the sort of historical framework that staging often lacks. Hearing Roshan’s unconventional compositions score Sahir Ludhianvi’s words in Mohammed Rafi or Mukesh’s voice is far more interesting than, say, watching his adult sons recall the day he suddenly died.

The Rajesh Roshan segment does a decent job of presenting him as “the quiet one” (The Beatles’ George Harrison, notes Farhan Akhtar) who rarely advertised his talent. This is evident in how we might spend this episode thinking: wait, he made this song? 1990s purists might appreciate the cross-cutting between present-day Kumar Sanu, Udit Narayan and Sonu Nigam.

A still from The Roshans, starring Hrithik, Rakesh and Rajesh.

The closest these episodes come to a confession or prickly territory is when the women in the family speak of their husbands’ vices and addictions very respectfully. “I understand; he’s a creative human being,” a wife explains, seconds after the man admits that she bore the brunt of his alcohol-fuelled moods. While this is by no means a tell-all memoir, it is of little surprise that The Roshans conceals more than it reveals. Needless to say, opportunities are squandered.

For instance, when Rakesh Roshan speaks of his failed acting career, it’s natural to expect a nod to the siblings’ contrast in fortunes at that point — Rajesh Roshan was at his peak. But nobody goes there. It’s as if they were disconnected entities rather than overlapping stories. The near-fatal attack on Rakesh Roshan is wrapped in repetitive praise and motivational mottos by his family members.

It also says something about its over-curated vibe that the famous talking heads are shot at the same suburban hotel, not in their own personal spaces. It kind of implies that they are in service of a project rather than in introspection or examination of a subject. As a result, the docu-series feels like a glossy equivalent of that one name-dropping relative at every function. It only projects the illusion of insight and intimacy.

The Rakesh Roshan and Hrithik Roshan segments are prone to a bubble-like artificiality. It’s hard not to notice the performative nature of even the more honest moments. Perhaps it has something to do with the blurred lines between acting and living for the screen, but Hrithik in particular comes across as someone who’s playing Hrithik Roshan. There are echoes of his Luck By Chance persona Zaffar Khan — who was, ironically, a self-aware satire of Bollywood narcissism. The camera cooperates, resorting to tight close-ups of the “characters” when the eyes go glassy or thoughts trail off. At times, it descends into mockumentary-style farce; one of the shots almost replicates a Krrish-style superhero frame with a rumbling score… at a farmhouse. 

That’s going to be an inherent problem of this genre. We might only learn the width of prestige, not the depth of art. We might only see posterity productions posturing as slick tributes. The rest becomes an exercise in star-gazing, screenshot fodder and Shah Rukh-spotting. In a way, a docu-series like The Roshans is a cultural subset of the re-release ecosystem.

Given Hindi cinema’s current crisis of identity, it offers easy throwbacks and greatest-hits packages, as well as an excuse for viewers to enjoy a no-frills blast from the past. Its access is so wide that it is more about who’s talking than what they’re saying. It’s just comfortable. And comfort, as we know, is immune to criticism. Bring on potential titles like The Kapoors, The Kapoors and The Khans. Maybe we have nowhere else to look. Maybe re-releases are our only release.