Director: Aditya Datt
Writers: Renzil D’Silva, Sameer Arora, Srinita Bhoumick, Rehan Khan, Venika Mitra
Cast: Gulshan Devaiah, Anurag Kashyap, Harleen Sethi, Saurabh Sachdeva, Aishwarya Sushmita
Number of episodes: 8 (dropping weekly)
Streaming on: Disney+ Hotstar
Adapted from a 2017 German show of the same name, Bad Cop is yet another dysfunctional marriage of mass entertainment and long-format storytelling. The day will come when showrunners realize that this tone and form are incompatible. The day will come when writers realize that it’s like forcing a T20 specialist to play Test cricket. But today is not that day. This review is based on the first 6 (out of 8) episodes provided, but you don’t need to know what happens to judge how ineffective the series is.
Bad Cop stars Gulshain Devaiah in a double role (his second after Vasan Bala’s Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, 2018) as, you guessed it, twin brothers named Karan and Arjun. Karan is a hassled inspector, Arjun is a hassled crook. The show opens with Arjun and his ‘bindaas’ girlfriend Kiki (Aishwarya Sushmita) trying to scam a man in a hotel only to get entangled in the murder of a famous journalist while escaping. They become the prime suspects. Arjun goes to estranged brother Karan for help, only to once again get caught up in a deadly shootout. Safe to say Arjun has the worst luck in the world.
This is when the central conceit emerges. Unbeknownst to everyone – don’t ask how – Arjun replaces Karan and pretends to lead his life. This involves fooling a hostile wife, oblivious daughter, angry CBI officer and clueless police force. None of them can tell the difference, making you wonder if it’s happened before. Between saving a broken marriage and tracking down his brother’s attackers, Arjun plays the clichéd mistaken-identity game. Meanwhile, a notorious villain named Kazbe (Anurag Kashyap) orchestrates an ivory smuggling racket from prison. We know of the racket because a random shot in the first episode shows a poaching incident in a forest that would give Richie Mehta’s Poacher (2024) an existential crisis. Kazbe is not pleased to know that ‘Karan’ is alive and that his consignments keep running into trouble.
It’s the classic Hotstar Specials formula. Characters insist on sounding different kinds of Maharashtrian in the same sentence because the city is Mumbai. People ill-equipped to speak in ‘Bambaiya Hindi’ insist on doing so (the Munna from both 1995’s Rangeela and 2003’s Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. will file a defamation lawsuit some day). The result: A woman seriously tells a man “Woh beh gaya, tu reh gaya” (he drowned, you remained) after his twin brother drowns, and a baddie bellows “Main bahut fair aadmi hai, itna fair ki raat ko chamakta hai!” (I’m a very fair man, so fair that I sparkle at night) while threatening someone. Nobody reads the room. Nobody reads at all. Not to mention the random smattering of Marathi phrases across conversations. The dialogue thinks it’s the star. Mumbai, despite its crumbling infrastructure, deserves better.
But cultural appropriation – the sort that bases a setting on previous Bollywood movies rather than life – is the least of this crime drama’s crimes. The series has a staging problem. For instance, in an early scene, the real Karan is scolded by his superior at the police station. When he reaches home that night, the series ‘reveals’ that this superior is also his wife, Devika (Harleen Sethi). Their marriage is strained because of this tricky power dynamic. A loud spat later, it is again revealed that they have a little girl who’s traumatized by their relationship. Later, flashbacks reveal that Karan and Arjun were sadboi orphans. Everything is a revelation because how else would the viewer remain invested?
Another example is the over-staging of the villain, Kazbe, who seems to be doing something weirder every time he appears. One scene opens with him singing “Bedardi Raja” on top of a sex worker. Another opens with him in a bath-tub in broad daylight. Another has him shaving at night. Another has him sitting on the toilet while scolding his incompetent nephew. Another has him dancing with inmates to a Bollywood song before he receives a phone call (and goes back to dancing). The brief seems to be: Anurag Kashyap needs to look crazy at any cost. Even if he breathes, the activity needs to be eccentric. This gimmickry extends to the CBI officer, Aarif Khan, played by Saurabh Shrivastava in acting-coach mode. Khan behaves wonky for no good reason, modulating his voice and moving his body in a way that brings peak Jeff Goldblum to mind. It’s like he knows the camera is on him, so the character must never sound normal.
The action sequences let Mumbai down, too. It’s such a derivative use of spaces and godowns and bylanes that, if not for cell-phones, you’d think the chases are happening in the Seventies. At one point, Arjun leaves a tell-all letter for Devika on the table, decides to bail, changes his mind and rushes back seconds before she opens the letter. It’s all very generic. Gulshan Devaiah stood out in both Dahaad and Guns & Gulaabs last year, but there’s not much he can do in a show that makes him deliver one performance for two characters. Maybe it’s part of a larger plan or twist, but surely, the Karan-Arjun trope felt more evolved in 1995. Kashyap turns in a bill-paying performance, while the rest of the cast could’ve walked in from the sets of Taaza Khabar (2023) and we’d be none the wiser. The point being: Bad Cop is bad, if not worse, and it’s happy to be that way. All that matters are the eyeballs. The Indian streaming bubble has burst, and just like Karan and Arjun, it’s hard to tell OTT productions from the mainstream movies they were supposed to be an antidote for. Hindi cinema is ‘twinning’ all over again.