‘Masaba Masaba’ Review : An old style, still eye-catching!
Confession : I am not a fan of this particular format where actors play their own fictional versions in their fictional biographies. Why? Because it makes it harder to separate actor from character (very, very important), and slowly and involuntary, a bias starts to form.
But I still decided to give Masaba Masaba a try after watching its trailer. So for the sake of this review, I have italicized the names of actors and emboldened the names of characters.
The following review is 100% spoiler-free!
The design :
We get a glimpse of a celebrity designer’s life, filled with diva celebs, deadlines, projects, PR and the negative aspects of being in the glamour world.
Throughout the series we see Masaba’s internal monolouge (which, I think should have been used more often) and a cute version of her as a child. The child-version often appears when Masaba is facing difficult emotions, hinting at the need for healing the inner child. Kudos to the creators for that one!
Parallelly, we also see the actress side of Neena, where she keeps hustling and gives her very best despite all the challenges. Roles get cut? Whatever, new auditions. Younger actress messing on set? I will give my best nonetheless, I got a job to do. Age-shaming? Aunty kisko bola be!
Neena is full of perseverance, hell I will watch a show called Neena Oh Neena.
The patterns :
Masaba is a familiar chick-flick protagonist. Think Mia Thermopolis or Bridget Jones. She ‘messes up’ with important people, like with her investor Dhairya Rana (Neil Bhoopalam). She makes bad decisions, regrets them and does it all again. She has an ex, a divorced husband, an unpredictable love-interest. She leans on her mother, has her differences, but at the end – its always back to the mothership. The mom and daughter story is one of the most heartwarming themes in the series.
The show also highlights multiple millennial tropes :
- Vanity and self-expression through social media
- Sliding into DMs
- Drunk texting your ex
- Day drinking and feeling bad
- Seeing a therapist
- Having a not so perfect bestie
- Big d**k energy
Summary :
Masaba Gupta has done a fine job despite being a non-actor.
However I feel that the secondary characters could have been much better written. They are sprinkled around but mostly serve as NPCs or give a foil to the protagonist.
Give this one a watch if you feel like having something light-hearted.
Rating :
