Director: Rahib Siddiqui
Writers: Nikhil Sachin, Vipul Mayank, Seema Sawhney Sharma, Abdullah Khan, Ayush Tiwari, Pooja Sharma, Sheetal Kapoor, Punar Vasu
Cast: Rajesh Kumar, Juhi Parmar, Hetal Gada, Anngad Raaj, Veena Mehta
No. of Episodes: 5
Streaming on: Amazon miniTV
Here we go again. A new season of a TVF (The Viral Fever) dramedy not named Panchayat emerges – and the review of the previous season applies. That’s not just a sly plug of a year-old piece, it’s an indication of the formulaic nature of the series. I have almost nothing to add this time. The same problems are inherited by Season 3 of Yeh Meri Family: The Amar-Chitra-Katha-esque treatment, the privatisation of Nineties nostalgia, the cloyingly sweet writing, the curated feel-goodness (even the baby elephants in the title montage of animal families look annoying now), the tacky staging, the Gullak-style mix of middle-class vignettes, the forced tensions. I still can’t come to terms with the stubborn superficiality of the TVF template — they’ve refused to evolve more than a decade after they inaugurated the Indian streaming space. Some of us have even replaced the term “web show” with the more sophisticated “digital television,” but this platform remains stuck at the web-show stage. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
But let’s try anyway. The Awasthi family is back for a five-episode run, with each episode dedicated to one member of the happy-go-plucky household. The town is unnamed so that middle-class nostalgia isn’t constrained by culture, but also because everyone has a different accent. Seventh grader and science nerd Rishi (Anngad Raj) breaks the fourth wall and provides the voice-over this year; his 16-year-old sister Ritika (Hetal Gada) continues to share an India-Pakistan equation with him. There’s dad Sanjay (Rajesh Kumar), the state-employed engineer and gentle giant of the family. There’s mom Neerja (Juhi Parmar), the disciplinarian who conforms to the TVF stereotype of the Crabby Housewife despite being a school teacher. Her temper is so predictable that it’s almost random. And there’s Grandma Awasthi (Veena Mehta), the old-timer who flits between tradition and modernity depending on whose side she takes.
At one point, it used to be cute that the ‘seasons’ of Yeh Meri Family are literally seasons. After summer and winter, the third season of the show unfolds in spring (tagline: “Spring of the 90’s”) – which, ironically, robs the setting of whatever little visual personality it had. Let’s be honest, spring is more of a Western concept. Given that Holi appears in an episode, it’s March and April, better known as Summer-but-not-May. It’s that middle-of-nowhere, anything goes sort of weather. I dread a Yeh Meri Family: Autumn in the 90’s next, because monsoon would require TVF to upgrade their scale and budgets.
Not for the first time, this show can’t resist flaunting its decade; it’s like that kid who turns up at a costume ball dressed as a Phantom cigarette every single year. It opens with a radio of course (and a mention of Sachin Tendulkar’s ‘Sharjah Storm’ in 1998), and the list of references is littered across the very first episode: PT Usha, Steffi Graf, suspenders, a Kajol-in-Kuch-Kuch-Hota-Hai hairstyle, a Pacman video-game, carrom, a malfunctioning VCR, Antakshari, the macarena dance. The issue isn’t the remember-those-days vibe. It’s that most of the modern cast — much like the screenplay — emphasises that vibe. When one teenager asks the other if her favourite hero is still Sunil Shetty, the name sounds like it’s being said by someone from the future; they want us to know that Sunil Shetty (or the compliment “you look like Neetu Kapoor”) was a normal term. What’s more, they look bemused. Even the foley effects — for example, the constant calls of hawkers in the bylanes — feel like they’re begging us to notice them. Rishi again dreams of a ‘handline’ in the future (“imagine phones we can carry in our pockets”), as if to remind the viewer of its pre-tech environment. Never mind that cell-phones were already a reality by then. It only goes to show the dissonance between the series and its stilted positioning of the good old days.
As a franchise, Yeh Meri Family slips in some interesting social observations. An episode revolves around the friction between the sister and brother after he develops an adolescent crush on her best friend. Another is rooted in the societal bias towards older people – their perceived lack of agency, the infantilization of them, the trivialisation of their desires. Another features the manifestation of a father’s insecurities: After being scolded by his IPS-officer brother, he changes his parenting style and becomes stricter. There’s also a gift-giving contest between Sanjay’s needy mother and his wife on his birthday. These are perceptive themes. But the expression is didactic. Even naturalism is a prototype here. Every character is reduced to the most basic version of themselves. A sad girl is shown doodling in her exam paper — her father later sees that it’s a kid wearing a noose.
They all talk like they’re in a daily soap, in tandem with the background score. The show commits the classic mistake of framing a physical rewind as an intellectual downgrade. People from bygone eras tend to sound sillier in such productions because they’re allegedly not as ‘advanced’ as today — an equivalent of the kids-written-by-adults or foreigners-written-by-locals syndrome. Every episode is equipped with a conflict that’s not earned. When all else fails, Neerja gets mad at someone and the others have to calm her down. It reeks of design, regardless of where the abrupt tonal shifts happen. Perhaps it’s meant for a younger demographic, but there is no excuse for the skit-like film-making. A Holi episode, in particular, is so inflated with gags and meltdowns and needless sulking that I wanted to shake Yeh Meri Family out of its colourless stupor. It’s all too much — or should I say, three much? Mind you, that’s a better cringe-pun than the Awasthis manage in any of the 40-but-should-have-been-25-minutes episodes.