What’s so bad about Bollywood?

A still from the satirical action comedy drama The Ba***ds of Bollywood, starring Lakshya Lalwani

I suspect Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-24, HBO) sorta set the tone/template for minimally surveying showbiz freelancers, going about their day, like any other, in Hollywood/LA.

For, what's even Seth Rogen in The Studio (2025, Apple TV), but Larry, in his own way; no?

Consider the sixth episode of the sensational series where Seth, as the beta studio-boss, is stuck among serious doctors at a party, where none can fathom the significance of the movies. Only Seth's frickin' obsessed!

That's true for blokes in Bollywood as well. I try not to mix my friends between the two worlds. One lot eventually gets bored through the damn evening.

Shah Rukh Khan's (SRK) Red Chillies, incidentally, produced what comes quite close to Curb in its tenor.

That was the film Kaamyaab (2019) - sheer slice of showbiz low life, solely on the shoulders of the superb, Sanjay Mishra, playing a retired ‘character actor', known for one memorable line, "Enjoying life. Aur option kya hai!"

What about SRK's Red Chillies' series for Netflix, The B'''ds of Bollywood (read: Bads of Bollywood), set in Mumbai's movie/entertainment industry?

Sure, there could be a cube of Curb, even an element of Entourage, but more so the filminess of Farah Khan (Om Shanti Om), aiming equally toward the edginess and empathy of Zoya Akhtar (Luck By Chance).

And yet, standing tall for a full-on fun take on films and ‘filmies', as a completely silly, unpretentious, entertaining series on its own; often switching/playing with genres, but mostly staying within over-the-top humour.

For a setting, Hindi cinema is a hard place to pull off, you realise, from shows that end up seeming so unbearably superficial (Call My Agent: Bollywood), or simply a spoof of spoof (Emran Hashmi starrer, Showtime).

What did I love, first, about Bads of Bollywood? That it's not about a tragic ‘struggler', a term only applied to aspiring actors. Nor is it really on the boring inner workings of the movie industry.

No lay viewer cares about the latter, anyway. As for the former - frankly, aren't you tired of hearing famous-guy sob-stories on how they once eked out a living, skipping meals, sleeping on pavements….

Presuming it was for a larger social purpose. They were chasing a personal dream; so? Or that they faced (fair/unfair) rejections. As if the world owes an aspiring actor anymore than a broke telemarketer.

Bads of Bollywood opens with its protagonist (Lakshya Lalwani), already a star; albeit a debutant, from Delhi, in Mumbai, with a popular parallel in SRK himself.

He steps into a single-screen theatre to catch his first film, only to exit the cinema with public tearing his clothes off. That's straight outta Hrithik Roshan's life.

What follows is a story of how you never really make it! Struggles continue. Only stakes differ. Life takes over. Hero, heroine (Sahher Bambba) first meet at an actors' roundtable (think Siddhant Chaturvedi). Next, at the duty-free shop of a domestic airport!

Between the hero, hero ka jobless best-friend (Raghav Juyal), mother (Mona Singh), uncle (Manoj Pahwa), girlfriend ka baap (Bobby Deol) - all the actors taking their parts seriously, as against caricatures in a comedy - what you have with Bads is a mainstream, retro Bollywood picture, in its own right.

Only, with Bollywood as the setting. Which is a culture of its own; more liberal than the rest of India; less dull than any day-job, given professional daredevils, without a Plan B; packed with its internal politics, and external targeting.

Commentary, I suspect, is a bit like stock market tips. It's not as much about what's being said, but who's saying it! That the creator of Bads of Bollywood is SRK's son Aryan Khan, 27 (co-created by Bilal Siddiqi, Manav Chauhan), adds such a layer of unique meta humour to it all.

Take that self-referencing scene, which I'm sure by now is a meme, where the sleuth from the narcotics department nabs a DJ (Neville Bharucha) for smoking up.

"But I'm not from Bollywood," DJ says, and is left alone! Aryan, as generously, drops the N-word, as in nepotism, while taking pot-shots at his own dad, "Dhai ghante ka Badshah!"

For a first-timer, he's filmed what he knows best. Making this a ‘Zoya Akhtar-ian' debut of sorts. As it is, privilege is what you make of it.

Here, you watch the writer-director equally smartly placing together the top cameos, only available to a superstar's son - Aamir Khan, Arshad Warsi, Karan Johar, Emraan Hashmi, onwards - fitting them like chess pieces into a proper plot.

The tools of trade are obviously in abundance. Here's a young kid, set free to play with the toys, but employing it rather effectively for movie-screen splendour.

Left to itself, Bads of Bollywood has as much high-flying action as an average A-grade, VFX actioner. Imagine Fast & Furious in Mumbai. Let alone the Lambo, you watch a motorbike chase down the Bandra-Worli Sea Link!

Did I expect any of this from a supposed, low-key parody series on the film frat?

Frankly, didn't expect the Game of Thrones-like twist at the end of it, either. Which cleverly reveals the asterisks in the show's unusual title.

Yup, like many of you, that's the last thing I loved about Bads of Bollywood.

So good!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.