Sex, Lies and Bad Storytelling

Directors: Puneet Krishna, Amrit Raj GuptaWriters: Puneet Krishna, Sumit Purohit, Aarti Raval, Karan VyasCast: Manav Kaul, Tillotama Shome, Faisal Malik, Shubhrajyoti Barat, Naina Sareen, Jitin Gulati, Shweta Basu Prasad, Sumit Gulati, Ashok Pathak, Amarjeet SinghEpisodes: 9Streaming on: NetflixTribhuvan Mishra: CA Topper swings for the fences with its pitch: A modest chartered accountant moonlights as a gigolo to make ends (and bodies) meet. It has enough sex, lies and duct tape to be greenlit by a streamer. Only, it emerges that this new Netflix comedy is swinging for the fences in the wrong sport altogether. Tribhuvan Mishra somehow takes that one-liner and turns it into a bloated and sticky nine-hour-long mess. It’s a slog to watch of course, but it’s more heartbreaking than frustrating. I say this because the series – like a prodigy that can grow up to be anyone they want – has the whole world at its feet: A potent idea; a great cast; a fertile setting (Noida); the creative voices behind Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story, Mirzapur and Gullak; the rare ambition to stage sex as a need rather than a commercial aesthetic; and the cultural courage to view it through the prism of female desire. It would take some doing, or undoing, to kill the vibe.The protagonist, Tribhuvan Mishra (Manav Kaul), is a nice riff on Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi’s Surinder Sahni. He is an honest employee of the Noida Town Planning Board. A lovable “loser”. A naive fool. Except he has a superpower: He’s a selfless machine in bed (his breathless wife mentions this explicitly, lest we doubt his career transition). When he takes up sex work, his Suri morphs into a confident and cool Raj; the body language changes, the financial problems disappear, the shyness is gone. The Shah Rukh Khan hangover doesn’t end there. His favourite client, Bindi (Tillotama Shome), is a Bollywood fanatic who gets turned on by the sight of her real-world ‘heroes’ dancing to, among other things, the Baazigar title track (a nod to Mishra’s double life).