The Disney+ Hotstar series tells us the oldest story of Bollywood: an insider clashing against an outsider, and a male-dominated industry resisting any kind of female agency
At this point in Indian streaming, it is rare that a show manages to surprise — first impressions are almost never deceiving and judging a show by its one-line premise seems to be the only efficient way to weed out actual storytelling from the round-the-clock content churn. Shows that you assume will be good are almost always that way and the ones that you expect to disappoint work overtime in their commitment to underwhelm. To stand out then, is a matter of luck, skill, and more importantly, voice.
Showtime, the latest Disney+ Hotstar series bankrolled by Dharmatic Entertainment, the digital arm of Dharma Productions, managed to surprise me within its very first episode. I had already made up my mind about the show after the initial minutes of the episode when it seemed apparent to me what direction its plot would head. So, by the time Showtime revealed its actual conceit in the final minutes, I was bowled over by the sheer camp of its narrative audacity. It’s a plot twist I didn’t see coming simply because plot twists haven’t been this unapologetically pulpy in a while.
The good old Bollywood premise
Created by Sumit Roy (who has previously co-written Gehraiyaan and Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani) and co-directed by Mihir Desai and Archit Kumar, Showtime is a deliciously unhinged love-child of Jubilee and Inside Edge. Like Jubilee, Showtime revolves around the power-struggles at a legacy film production house and like Inside Edge, the show also revolves around the behind-the-scenes betting battles that influence what we end up watching onscreen.
Effectively, it tells us the oldest story of Bollywood — an insider clashing against an outsider, the underdog standing tall against the favourite, and a male-dominated industry resisting any kind of female agency. Which is to say Showtime is a near-perfect marriage of melodrama and drama that straddles the lines between self-awareness and parody with complete abandon.
Co-written by Sumit Roy, Lara Chandni, and Mithun Gangopadhyay, Showtime opens on the 40th anniversary of Victory Studios, a legacy production studio started by Victor Khanna (Naseerrudin Shah), a maverick filmmaker who has spent a lifetime making the kind of love stories that insist on bottling magic on a big screen for four hours. His son Raghu (Emraan Hashmi), on the other hand, is a businessman who believes in seeing films for what they are — a business that should yield profits.
It’s this exact mindset that helps Raghu churn films that end up as box-office blockbusters as a ruthless producer, bringing Victory Studios closer to glory while simultaneously estranging him from his filmmaker father who sees Raghu’s success as a blot on his artistic conscience. So, when time comes for Raghu to inherit the film studio that he single handedly transformed into a content factory, his best laid plans go awry as Victor appoints Mahika Nandy (Mahima Makwana), an aspiring film critic as the new studio boss.
From its premise alone, Showtime is a show that is designed to appeal to the voyeurism of a movie-watching audience unable to separate Bollywood blinds from Bollywood. It’s a formula that Dharma Productions already mined in The Fame Game (2022), an underwhelming Netflix series that used the tale of a missing actress to inspect the underbelly of Bollywood glamour.
But unlike that show, Showtime isn’t only defined by its self-referential commentary. Its storytelling has its own identity, one that can pass muster even when you take out the hat-tips to Yash Raj Films, Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Shah Rukh Khan, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, and an auto-tuned Badshaah track as the secret ingredient for a 100-crore film.
The commitment to the pulpy pitch
Some of the more interesting Indian shows of the last couple of years have been creator-led, distinguishable by their creative appetite, effective staging, and competent execution. Much of the reason why Showtime works is because it is cut from the same cloth — who it is made by defines how it is made in the first place.
By that, I’m not just talking about the access and the attention to detail, but also the pulpy pitch of its storytelling which rarely undermines its own abilities over the course of its four episodes, allowing the screenplay to take leaps of logic and make it appear as the only viable course of action. (A small detail I really dug is every episode beginning with a recap of the previous episode in the same vein as television soap-operas).
The lunacy is bolstered by the casting: Rajeev Khandelwal and Mouni Roy, two of the most successful television actors, are respectively cast as an insecure superstar and a wronged starlet to deliver turns that demand hamminess. That the gimmick pays off has more to do with Khandelwal’s quiet genius, his ability to play a self-absorbed superstar with the selfishness of a bruised child.
Some of the best moments of the show revolve around Khandelwal conveying the minutest mood-shifts with facial contortions. It’s a delightful performance, one that is rooted in interpreting acting as reacting, affording Hashmi’s all-out angry rendition of an egotistical studio boss with levity.
It’s never not fun to see Hashmi enjoy himself onscreen and it helps that the one-liners roll off the actor’s tongue like it is muscle memory. But I wish Makwana’s turn had a little more bite — the actress slowly eases into her character but struggles to actually sell her overnight makeover from a wide-eyed journalist to a righteous girlboss.
In fact, her wardrobe — she goes from wearing a kurta and jeans to a three-piece suit — does most of the heavy lifting, another example of the show’s commitment to its own pulp. That’s the thing about the four episodes of Showtime (the second installment is slated to drop in June), it is clearly created, written, and directed by storytellers who remain insistent on having fun with poking holes at their own voice.
