In an episode from the third season of SonyLIV’s Cubicles, a team lead recruits a fresh face to stir his sluggish team of subjects into a committed sprint. The decision though backfires and sends him running to the company HR to have it unrolled. “Do you remember your first day?” the HR asks, in what is a humbling reminder of the patience it takes to build ladders we take for granted. It’s also a sequence that illuminates a side of corporate life we never quite see, because it is by design and intent supposed to be shielded. Guarded like the conventional wisdom that says a plucky show about an early career engineer’s trials and tribulations through the revolving doors of a tech company would be near uninteresting. Except, in its third season running Cubicles offers rich evidence that meaningful stories can come from anywhere, even from behind those dutifully boring square boxes.
Piyush Prajapati played by the excellent Abhishek Chauhan, returns in this third season along with most of the old cast. Piyush is now the team lead, a young prodigy promoted ahead of his peers (including some seniors). Such meteoric – in terms of shared professional space – rises are obviously met with doubt, self-loathing and a vein of casual jealousy. They are also signifiers of added responsibility, the challenge of accommodating agonies, re-directing anger and generating happiness and camaraderie where maybe none exist. Piyush’s teammates are now his subjects which means friendships are stretched, language constrained and stakes elevated.
Directed by Divyanshu Malhotra, the five-episode third season sees Piyush learn the ropes of leadership as he fails and fails some more before eventually succeeding. A young new member must be guarded against being ‘othered’, a friend has to reluctantly be read the riot-act and a fiercely competitive colleague must be assuaged to parley a kind of middle ground. Through it all Cubicles manages to also introduce us to the devices of literature. It doesn’t merely quote philosophies but tries to apply them to the fabric of something as dry as corporate culture. Lunch get-togethers, office trips, midnight coding marathons are all symbols of something far greater and deeper than the sum of their working, measurable excel sheets.
What has always worked for this plucky little show is the fact that it never really wants to become anything more than what it is – a sort of understated daily soap about the tribulations of corporate life. Surprisingly, it has real energy, knows how to pepper things with nuance and when to let them loosely be. The humour has sort of taken a backseat over the last two seasons as the drama born out of desperation and careerism has taken over the grooves and rhythms of larger-than-life storytelling. Thankfully, Cubicles has never looked down upon the world it is set in with disdain or elite condescension. It instead believes that these stories, however compressed and limited to their purview are worth untangling with empathy and patience. To anyone who’s lived even a moment this life the show has always remained eminently watchable.
Part of the show’s charm is Chauhan’s continued brilliance. He sells the do-good leader with a fragile moral centre. He looks dogged and determined, but also clueless and beaten. He is given to jealousy, insecurity and wild musings that comply with the idea that most people who slug it out in these seemingly boring jobs, are in fact bursting with life, ideas and perspective. TVF’s world of middle-path cinema and entertainment has conquered unfancied spaces, but the three season run of a show that practically unpacks an engineering graduate’s first three years of corporate life, is commendable for its persistence and admirable for its execution.
Familiarity can often be a recourse for boredom, but with Cubicles it feels like the adornment of meaning and purpose. All that anger, resentment, joy and failure is given at least rudimentary shape, a pause of human dimension as opposed to the unfiltered romp of time, valued on a yearly basis. To its credit, the show in its third season continues to also tackle the ignominy of corporate rejection, the fact that despite its god-willing achievers there are those who get left behind.
Much like life, professional voyages settle into unremarkable rhythms after a point. Once you’ve become the leader of a few men and women, the only route left is the inflation of your burdens, the expansion of your territory and the exaggeration of your importance. It’s just how this thing works. The youthful restlessness eventually gives way to a humbling wisdom of sorts. But at least for that inductive period of bad ideas and worse decisions, Cubicles is a lovingly made little show which adds a third dimension to lives seemingly lived in the two-dimensional world between start and stop, work and deliver, earn and ruin.
Cubicles season 3 is now streaming on SonyLiv
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