The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives is a Koffee with Karan episode stretched eight episodes too long and featuring four women who wouldn’t make it to the Koffee with Karan couch in the first place. I know that sounds cruel, but I also know that even you have been thinking the same thing.
Karan Johar is, not surprisingly, the man behind this Netflix series. He also pops up as a kind of devil’s advocate in a few episodes to lob some tricky, catfight-inducing questions at the ladies. There is no hamper to be won here, but we in the audience do lose more than a few brain cells in the process.
The show, of course, clearly falls in the category of binge-able trash, a lot like the cringeworthy but embarrassingly addictive Netflix hit Indian Matchmaking. And there really is no reason to review it on the parameters that we review other shows on. But The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives — part The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, part Keeping Up With The Kardashians and full moronic mess — is unforgivably boring. In episode after episode, you yawn through the carelessly scripted lives of four Bollywood wives, with almost everything playing out on a loop. The drama is forced, the situations contrived, at least one catfight runs out of sizzle as soon as it starts, and everything seems like it’s been staged to serve as a publicity showcase for not only the four women but also for their families.
So you have Shanaya Kapoor being introduced as a potential Bollywood heroine in the first episode when the 20-year-old jets off to Paris for the annual debutante showcase called Le Bal, parents Sanjay and Maheep Kapoor in tow. Bhavana Panday, actor Chunky Panday’s wife and mother to Ananya Panday, uses the show to publicise her pret venture, while yesteryear actress Neelam consistently talks about how it’s time she made a comeback to the movies. The fourth, Seema Khan (who is married to Sohail Khan, part-time actor-director but full-time Salman Khan’s brother), spends a considerable amount of time in one episode being lectured on how to make her clothing label more “visible” by ex-sister-in-law Malaika Arora. Malaika, predictably, does all the talking lying on a yoga mat.
Shah Rukh Khan and wife Gauri make an appearance in the final episode Sourced by the correspondent
Truth be told, none of the four women are Bollywood A-listers, which is perhaps also the reason why they signed up for the show in the first place. Neelam apart, the other three are ‘famous’ only by association, and their husbands are either has-beens or never really arrived in the first place (though Maheep does claim that Sanjay was a “superstar newcomer” more than once in the series).
When they aren’t trying to talk over each other, we see the four women catching up over brunches and dinners, discussing everything from how to pronounce ‘oesophagus’ to taking sides on Harry and Meghan’s ‘Brexit’ from the royal family. In keeping with the show’s ‘brand showcase’ DNA, they fly off to Doha for an all-girls’ vacation (Sex in the City, yawn) and acing their fears (Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, double yawn), all the while promoting Qatar as a tourist destination. No, Maldives hadn’t got the Bolly memo back then.
The four are always dressed to the nines, sporting blow-dried hair and made-up faces on Zoom calls. They sign up for a beach cleanup in one episode, landing up in coordinated outfits. Yes, it’s a show meant to be vacuous, but even vacuous can be entertaining. This isn’t.
Instead what we get is information ranging from banal to ridiculous. Like Maheep using binoculars to spy on her neighbours on a daily basis. Seema being such a big fan of Kim Kardashian that she DMs her on Instagram regularly. Or Bhavana claiming that she has the best sex life among all her friends. Did we really need to know that?!
And then, of course, are the wide-ranging accents on display, each more muddled than the other. Maheep, hands down the most irritating of the four (for the record, Neelam is the most tolerable), refers to her friends as “twats” and calls Seema a “barking cow” in one episode. At one point, she says, “The last few years have seen a big change in climate change”. Yes, when a show is this terrible, you start keeping an eye on the language. This one fails that test too.
Attempting to perk up matters are a few celebrity appearances. Janhvi Kapoor pops in for lunch, Ekta Kapoor hangs out with Neelam offering career advice and Arjun Kapoor turns up to talk about how to handle trolls. Raveena Tandon cooks some hummus.
There are some interesting bits, like a reference to Seema and Sohail’s fractured marriage (described on the show as “unconventional”), Maheep lamenting about being “the less successful” Kapoor family, Sanjay talking about how nepotism never ‘helped’ him and Chunky ruing how he never won an award in a three-decade-long career. But all of this is quickly glossed over. Instead, what we get is one of the women saying how she choked up when her daughter got an award, but she held back her tears because she didn’t want to ruin her mascara.
It’s actually the men on the show who turn out to be more interesting. Sanjay Kapoor occasionally drops some self-deprecating jokes, while actor Samir Soni — Neelam’s husband — isn’t afraid to show his social awkwardness. And we did laugh out loud (guilty as charged) when Chunky called himself “Phoney Stark” after saying he looks like Robert Downey Jr. And how, in his younger days, he thought he looked like Richard Gere. “So I called myself Richard ‘reverse gear’,” laughed Chunky. Come on, that was funny!
It takes another man to save this wreck of a show in the last 15 minutes. Shah Rukh Khan does a Shah Rukh Khan, with words and dimples, wife Gauri in tow, and prevents The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives from being a totally wasted exercise. Well, at least he does make it far more watchable than Zero.
