Directors: Puneet Krishna, Amrit Raj Gupta
Writers: Puneet Krishna, Sumit Purohit, Aarti Raval, Karan Vyas
Cast: Manav Kaul, Tillotama Shome, Faisal Malik, Shubhrajyoti Barat, Naina Sareen, Jitin Gulati, Shweta Basu Prasad, Sumit Gulati, Ashok Pathak, Amarjeet Singh
Episodes: 9
Streaming on: Netflix
Tribhuvan Mishra: CA Topper swings for the fences with its pitch: A modest chartered accountant moonlights as a gigolo to make ends (and bodies) meet. It has enough sex, lies and duct tape to be greenlit by a streamer. Only, it emerges that this new Netflix comedy is swinging for the fences in the wrong sport altogether. Tribhuvan Mishra somehow takes that one-liner and turns it into a bloated and sticky nine-hour-long mess. It’s a slog to watch of course, but it’s more heartbreaking than frustrating. I say this because the series – like a prodigy that can grow up to be anyone they want – has the whole world at its feet: A potent idea; a great cast; a fertile setting (Noida); the creative voices behind Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story, Mirzapur and Gullak; the rare ambition to stage sex as a need rather than a commercial aesthetic; and the cultural courage to view it through the prism of female desire. It would take some doing, or undoing, to kill the vibe.
The protagonist, Tribhuvan Mishra (Manav Kaul), is a nice riff on Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi’s Surinder Sahni. He is an honest employee of the Noida Town Planning Board. A lovable “loser”. A naive fool. Except he has a superpower: He’s a selfless machine in bed (his breathless wife mentions this explicitly, lest we doubt his career transition). When he takes up sex work, his Suri morphs into a confident and cool Raj; the body language changes, the financial problems disappear, the shyness is gone. The Shah Rukh Khan hangover doesn't end there. His favourite client, Bindi (Tillotama Shome), is a Bollywood fanatic who gets turned on by the sight of her real-world ‘heroes’ dancing to, among other things, the Baazigar title track (a nod to Mishra’s double life).
But complications arise when Bindi’s husband, Teeka Ram Jain (Shubhrajyoti Barat) – a pious sweet-shop owner who moonlights as a contract gangster – finds out about them. The henchman (Amarjeet Singh) who catches her red-handed is also an SRK fan. To be fair, who isn’t? (The answer to that is Jain’s second henchman – played by Panchayat’s Ashok Pathak – who is a proud Salman Khan fan). Mishra must eventually deal with the consequences, but he must also ask himself a tough question: Is he doing it for the money or the pleasure? He starts out as a desperate breadwinner, but perhaps gets addicted to the man his clients make him feel like. His ‘social service’ might not be as selfless as he believes.
Evidently, the primary storyline has enough meat. For reference, it can easily unfold in Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein territory, where a twisted romance comes disguised as a campy thriller. But Tribhuvan Mishra, like its hero, refuses to face the music. Instead of trusting the depth of its domestic drama, it resorts to the oldest trick in the book – an accidental crime, followed by endless cat-and-mouse chases between a truckload of characters. Every second show seems to swear by the “more is more” rule these days. None of these offshoots are organic either; it’s just there because Tribhuvan Mishra is an excessive nine-episode show and not a two-hour feature film. There’s a goofy investigation led by a food-loving cop (Faisal Malik). There’s Mishra’s insurance-selling brother-in-law (Sumit Gulati), his deceptively wild wife (Shweta Basu Prasad) and her obsession with guns. I’m not sure what their deal is, but the endgame-fetish is the image of a coy sari-clad housewife rocking two pistols to the tune of “She’s a cool crazy cat”.
There’s Mishra’s greedy boss and the secretary he’s having an affair with. There’s a mysterious female colleague who Mishra confides in. There’s Mishra’s nosy mother-in-law and her octogenarian suitor. There’s a gym instructor (Jitin Gulati) who mentors Mishra in the gigolo business. There are rival builder gangs who – when told by the Muslim inspector that they answer to the same religion – reply that they only answer to economics. There’s also Jain’s side hustle: He ‘repairs’ marriages by kidnapping cheating men and women at the behest of their angry spouses. When he isn’t doing that, he’s straight up murdering rivals so that we’re amused by Bindi’s nonchalance: She fantasizes about him loving like Satya’s Bhiku Mhatre and Baazigar’s Vicky Malhotra, but he only kills like them.
There’s orange cake, yellow scooters, flashbacks of queer lovers, stylized shootouts in toilets and functions and living rooms, and so much more that you wonder if the series is simply padding up its central theme until it’s unrecognizable. Is it sheepish about the very act it claims to normalize? Ironically, the sex itself is reduced to musical montages of adventurous positions, grunts, moans and satisfied faces. A passing nod aside, there’s no sign of the adverse effect Mishra’s ‘marathons’ have on his marriage. His wife (Naina Sareen) is treated as little more than a simpleton whose suspicions serve the stretched plot rather than their middle-class companionship. Most of all, the fundamental transformation of Mishra is implausible. The first few episodes build him up to be a certain type of man – someone who isn’t conditioned to tell sex from love, or lust from intimacy – but he conveniently becomes another for the sake of the show. His guilt goes for a toss. All it takes is a forced encounter with a call-girl and an escort website.
The problem is obvious: Tribhuvan Mishra is an awkward mix of absurdist satire and social dramedy. No single genre is realized; scenes are long, almost as if they go searching for humour or emotion and don’t stop until one appears. When Jain learns of his wife’s infidelity, he keeps looking at the video so that his punchline – “sex is fine, but she made him dance” – lands. It doesn’t, because the moment is so clearly reaching for wit. Similarly, an old lady punctuates a tense cat-out-of-the-bag moment with “I wish we had such services in my time,” a line so planted that the levity mocks the gravity instead of deflating it.
When all else fails, the Mirzapur-style cussing and vivid language stay at it. The goal is to entertain at any cost, which is why the actual humanity – two sexless marriages, a one-sided love story, a grieving friend, the circumstances of the clients – feels incidental. An example is the sudden Ayushman-Khurrana-fication of Mishra’s profession. At one point, the music softens and we see a bald woman with breast cancer thanking him, followed by a grateful burkha-clad lady remarking that “sex isn’t only for conceiving”. While the intention is to free these women from societal bias and patriarchal tropes, such token additions do exactly the opposite.
The performances lack both consistency and bite. Manav Kaul is the right choice, but his character is thinly sketched, often falling prey to the whims of writing. Ditto for Tillotama Shome, whose Bindi belongs more to the Killer Soup universe. Of the rest, only Shubhrajyoti Barat and Shweta Basu Prasad look like they’re having a good time. The visual tone and over-produced chaos bring to mind Bangistan (2015), a suicide-bomber parody that similarly fluffed its lines. Every indoor space is lit with neons, reds, greens and blues, as if to merge the hyper-reality of the show with the perceived seediness of its world. But the result is jarring to the eyes – a giant Dexter’s laboratory parading as Hindi pulp-fiction. The pop-cultural gags try too hard: A shady lodge (with a phallus-shaped sign) called Madhur Milaap, a gym called Golden Gorilla, or the end credits of a film flashing “directed by Ram Gopal Ratnam”. The visual gags aren’t far behind: Twin clients shot like the twin girls of The Shining; a rope-seller on the street unwittingly echoing Mishra’s suicidal thoughts (the design is off: he imagines a noose just before an actual noose appears); or Mishra ending up on a horse like a brideless groom after a wedding.
In short, Tribhuvan Mishra crumbles under the pressure of promise and becomes a funky drifter instead. Every creative decision is a lesser version of itself, like stray blobs of colour constantly missing a canvas. It is six episodes too long and seven characters too wide. I know film criticism is about judging a title for what it is and not what it could have been. But what Tribhuvan Mishra is – imagine Rohit Sharma’s career if he hadn’t been asked to open the batting in 2013 – gets inextricably linked to what might have been. It’s hard not to think of the economical choices and emotional complexities the show avoids to templatize its concept. At the risk of sounding like a petty uncle, how can the story of a talented topper be so directionless? The sex is fine, but it made him dance.