Rangeen

As the episodes unfold, it becomes clear that 'Rangeen' doesn’t have the clarity of what it wants to say. It jumps from comedy to drama to awkward emotional scenes, without ever really landing on a tone that works. The story tries to cover a lot of topics, from marital problems, broken dreams, damaged pride to small-town judgement. However, it ends up only scratching the surface. There are times the series feels dragged, despite addressing these important themes. Viineet Kumar Siingh plays the lead role of Adarsh, and while he’s a talented actor, here he seems a bit lost. Adarsh is meant to be a man dealing with a deep personal crisis, trying to figure out who he really is. But the performance doesn’t fully capture that complexity.

The show has been created and written by Amir Rizvi and Amardeep Galsin and directed by Kopal Naithani and Pranjal Dua. Rangeen has a way of starting a train of thought and then setting it aside for something else. The idea is presumably to pad a slim premise – there’s only so much of Adarsh’s dithering that viewers can take. Were it not for the actors and a bunch of well-written scenes, Rangeen would have been as colourless as Adarsh. The makers rely on contrivance and coincidence to connect various plot strands. They take their time too, stretching out scenes and prolonging matters all the way to nine episodes. The easily distracted plot is the most coherent when regarding Adarsh’s bumbling adventures in gigolodom. While these moments are supposed to be comic, Adarsh’s agony is unmistakeable, giving the humour a dark edge.

Good actors and tepid writing plus tonal switches is not a good match. Singh does try hard but to hear a character say ‘Bond lag rahe ho?’ Um, no. Rajshri Deshpande and Sheeba Chadha, both actors capable of surprising you, do nothing of the sort, which is nothing short of criminal. Taaruk Raina’s likeable guy who enjoys what he does and yet wants to run away from his life, is about the only one with any verve: no 3sum, he texts, but gets into it anyway, with the help of some magic mushrooms, helpfully labelled ‘kukurmutta’ in Hindi, just in case we didn’t get it. A client whose thing is humiliation, brings it forward from her own marital relationship, and it takes Sitara to create an explainer for the clueless Adarsh for him to understand the whys and wherefores.