The Great Indian Kapil Show Review: More of the same as Netflix places its biggest bet for growth yet

For the first episode of The Great Indian Kapil Sharma Show on Netflix, Ranbir Kapoor, Riddhima Kapoor and mother Neetu Kapoor walk the red carpet.

“Netflix, nayi ho  yaa purani, har cheez ki packaging bohat achhi karte hain,” the returning Sunil Grover says in the first episode of Netflix’s The Great Indian Kapil Show. It’s a meta moment where Netflix both lays down a benchmark and a promise. We’ve seen all of this before, but maybe it will be better, denser and because it’s Netflix, maybe even woke. The first episode, though, largely contradicts that last part. The jokes are still the same, the milieu hardly distinctive in terms of forecast. Women and wives continue to bear the comedic brunt but maybe it feels slightly more acceptable on a streaming service where you can always switch to something more woke and correctional. The content, it’s methods notwithstanding, this is Netflix’s biggest bet yet. It could open up an untapped market for a streaming service struggling to expand in India or it could finally bury the notion of streamer’s legacy as the progenitor of ‘binge-watching’.

Kapil Sharma’s new set certainly looks softer, if classier compared to the one on broadcast television. In this first episode, the stage apes the corridors of an airport, miming the idea that the show is set to go global with reach assured in 190 countries. Consume that speck of trivia with a pinch of salt, however, because the language and the hyperlocal nature of the celebrity on offer hardly ensures miles. That reach is a provincial promise and it means nothing without loyalty. It’s the latter that the streaming service is trying to build. Whatever dough it has splashed to get Sharma over to its side, without a spurt in subscription numbers, the show might only register as a blip on a giant radar also trying to build a brand new geography.

For the first episode, we see Ranbir Kapoor, Riddhima Kapoor and mother Neetu Kapoor walk the red carpet. There is little specificity to the newness, except maybe the red of Netflix seeping into the visual language of the set. But there is one wild card, the Grover-Sharma reunion that at one point seemed improbable. For a creative collaboration that has given tv comedy, it’s finest moments, this is a worthwhile attempt at engineering a cultural moment. We know the two are terrific together and this first episode offers evidence that Grover despite his wider, pockmarked foray into acting has still retained his comedic mojo. Whether that is enough to persuade viewers to buy a subscription though is hard to say at this early stage.

While the comedic moments, the staginess of the skits, the enforced punchlines still retain their charm there is plenty to analyse about this structural experiment. For one, the show will drop as an episodic weekend offering one of the first instances where Netflix has turned to the boat of legacy tv programming to discover a new wavelength. Principally, it goes against the grain of the streaming story that would otherwise dump all its content at once, to hook you in for hours. It’s possibly the only way to convince you to pay for something that doesn’t make you wait and runs when you want it to. This, however, feels like a strategic detour, as Netflix India looks to pull that reluctant family audience to a viewing room some regard as too violent, inauspicious, scandalous or woke. What Kapil Sharma’s earthy but also problematic vein of comedy does alongside true-crime documentaries and violent sex romps is anyone’s guess.

There’s obviously a lot at stake here for both sides. Netflix India has possibly paid an undisclosed but eye-watering amount to put Sharma on its platform. Though it accords a certain prestige to the platform, in relation to Disney+Hotstar’s enviable hold of Koffee With Karan, it goes against the dictum of story and not celebrity powering the age of streaming. Of the many long-running TV successes, however, Sharma’s show offers perhaps the most convenient bet. It’s somewhere between a talk show, a comedic sprint and an adorable, sanitised pill of celebrity access. Unlike Koffee With Karan which has flirted with scandal, the Kapil Sharma show remains routinely in the lane of safe, punching-down familial fun. Even on Netflix, it feels unsubtle and overripe. The soft-boy charms of Sharma and his club of performers though retains its porous muscle. It’s breezy, unprovocative fun.

In terms of ideational pedagogy, this is Netflix India’s biggest bet yet. Not just in terms of the finances it must have taken to bring a stone-cold hit of television to the relatively walled city of streaming but because it hints at the wildest departure yet, from the service’s larger strategy. In other words, Netflix India has taken off the gloves to accept the unsophisticated nature of the Indian viewer. Give them entertainment in their language, diction and moral milieu and maybe they will come. The idea no longer seems to be to rewrite the book, but conform to what’s working. It’s a far-cry from the manifesto of mutinous overhaul. But it’s too soon to say that this is all it will take. Given the stakes, though, something is set to give.

The Great Indian Kapil Show is now streaming on Netflix.