There is something about Ananya. Few would have said that when she made her debut with mentor Karan Johar’s Student of the Year 2 a few years ago. But Chunky Panday’s daughter — despite having the ‘nepo baby’ tag hurled at her more often than not — has proved that she has the style and screen presence, charm and chutzpah to earn her place in the movies. Case in point: films like Gehraiyaan and Kho Gaye Hum Kahan. And now her web series debut Call Me Bae. Ananya’s Bae — ditsy to daring, romantic to rebellious — rocks, with the young actor imbuing the character, who is a poor little rich girl with a big heart, with a certain likeability that will endear her to the viewer. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about Call Me Bae.
The eight-episode series, meant to be frothy and fun, misses the memo by a fair bit. First, director Collin D’Cunha and writers Ishita Moitra, Samina Motlekar and Rohit Nair, can’t decide what they want Call Me Bae to be. This is the story of a mollycoddled Delhi socialite who, thrown out by her husband after an indiscretion, travels to Mumbai and within months becomes a high-flying TV journalist. While we are all for willing suspension of disbelief, especially with a show like this, the fact that Call Me Bae also wants you to take it seriously — #MeToo, invasion of privacy, data leaks, et al — shows how confused it is. As a result, it meanders somewhere between a Madhur Bhandarkar film (it could well have been named ‘Newsroom’) and a wannabe coming-of-age story filled with too many contrivances.
Every character in Call Me Bae, streaming on Prime Video, is a type. The ostentatious rich Delhi family type. The pushy mom type. The gym bro type. The influencer type. The serious, ethical journalist type. The best friend(s) type. And then, of course, is Vir Das’s TRP-hungry, megalomaniac Satyajit Sen aka SS. That he anchors a show called ‘Confessional’ where he spills secrets that apparently ‘the nation wants to know’ is a dead giveaway. Vir can take any line and turn it into comedy gold. In this show, working out of someone else’s insipid material, he clearly struggles.
So does Call Me Bae. Which is a pity because the writers, by casting Ananya, had a treasure trove of tone, theme and treatment to build on. The idea of taking someone and superimposing their perceived public persona on to a character played by them should have translated into a winner. Dharma Productions did that very successfully with Ranveer Singh’s gregarious himbo Rocky Randhawa in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani. But Call Me Bae, apart from a few scenes of inspired writing (a security guard mocking Bae with almost the same viral line about ‘privileged struggle’ that actor Siddhant Chaturvedi had dismissed Ananya with at an actors’ roundtable a few years ago, is smartly done) sticks to the same old, barely being able to make it to the finish line.
If the show works to some extent, it is only because of Ananya who owns her part. She gets ample support from an eye-popping wardrobe (‘Bae in Bombay,’ anyone?), credible acts from Gurfateh Pirzada, Niharika Lyra Dutt and Muskkaan Jaferi and even makes some extremely clunky lines work. But her Bae needed a better show. Like Alexis Rose, on whom Bae is clearly modelled, has the instant classic Schitt’s Creek.
