A wise person once said that the surest sign of good direction is when every performance in a movie or show—from the award-winning lead to the journeyman character actor with a two-line walk-in role—is excellent. People always conflate good direction with visual style, or other kinds of flamboyance, but rarely with acting. It’s possible for a skilled-enough performer to do a good job despite a poor script. But when the entire cast is in-sync—think of the recent The Power of the Dog, or Inglorious Basterds—it’s likely always down to good filmmaking; a sign that the actors were handled by someone who knew what they were doing.
But what about the opposite of this theory? Who’s to blame when every performance in a project is uniformly terrible? Is this the director’s fault? Or do the problems, especially in a writer’s medium like television, begin at the script stage?
There are no clear answers, but when you watch a show like Prime Video’s Bestseller— a tribute of sorts to Hindi pulp fiction, just like Haseen Dillruba and Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhein—you don’t blame mere mortals. You direct your anger towards the gods.
Forget pointing fingers at the director (Mukul Abhyankar), but even Meryl Streep couldn’t polish this script, written by Anvita Dutt (Bulbbul, uh oh) and Althea Kaushal, who has to her credit films such as Happy New Year, the Abhishek Bachchan-starrer Game, and Sonakshi Sinha’s Noor. A formidable record.
I never thought Prime Video would put out anything as deplorable as Breathe: Into the Shadows ever again. Tandav and The Forgotten Army came close, but Bestseller’s all-consuming ineptitude goes beyond just Amazon. It might truly be one of the worst originals ever produced by any mainstream Indian streamer. And I’ve sampled Ullu and Hoichoi titles.
Only Gauahar Khan somehow manages to escape relatively unscathed by this mess, which also features Shruti Haasan, Arjan Bajwa, Satyajeet Dubey and Mithun Chakraborty, who is top-billed, but shows up for the first time only in episode three.
Four episodes (of eight in total) were provided for preview. And it feels like they were written in less time than what it would take for you to watch them. Shrilly performed, bafflingly structured, and aggressively poor in every possible department, Bestseller has the gall to call itself a ‘fast-paced, gritty and intense psychological thriller’. But every minute feels like five, and every line of dialogue feels like a personal insult.
And it’s not like the show gets worse as it goes along. It tells you exactly how bad it is in the first five minutes, which is crammed with exposition so clunky that it makes Aranyak seem like Sacred Games by comparison. It’s almost as if Bestseller was written not by human beings, but by a bot who’d been fed a screenwriting ‘kunji’.
Every character announces what they do for a living when we first meet them, to people who should ideally already know. It’s so unnatural when writers deliver exposition in this manner, and it boggles my mind why so many of these desi streaming shows still do this. For instance, the pulp fiction novelist Tahir (Bajwa) tells his wife Mayanka (Khan) in their first scene together, “Tum 30 second ki ad banati ho, usme 2 second ka dimaag lagta hai, what do you know about writing a full-fledged book?” Why, thanks for telling us what your wife does, Tahir. But maybe we could’ve seen her in action instead? That would’ve conveyed this information too, perhaps a little more gracefully.
The premise, which I’ve clearly avoided talking about, involves Tahir—a terrible, terrible writer who happens to be a much worse person—and the mess that he gets himself into after stealing a fan’s manuscript and trying to pass it off as his own. Haasan plays the fan, Mithunda plays an ‘eccentric’ policeman, and Dubey plays a guy whose primary job seems to be looking into the camera at the end of every episode and deadpanning, “Chapter one,” and, “Chapter two,” and later, you guessed it, “Chapter three.”
I understand that ‘Mumbai noir’ is a thorny term in a post-Gehraiyaan world, but never has the genre been disrespected so tastelessly.
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