'Kaun Banegi Shikharwati' review: The question to ask is ‘Kyun Banai Shikharwati’?

The Naseeruddin Shah you see in 'Kaun Banegi Shikharwati' is not Naseeruddin Shah in 'Mandi' or 'Sparsh' or even 'A Wednesday' and 'Ishqiya' but the Naseeruddin Shah in 'The Blueberry Hunt'.

With apologies to Aaron Sorkin and his fantastic writing for the film A Few Good Men, I’d like to borrow (and appropriate) words that Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessop yells out in frustration, ‘Son, we live in a world that has content, and reviewers watch everything…You have the luxury of watching the best movies and shows on OTT platforms because reviewers save you from all the super ghastly shows that we watch night after sleepless night.’

Am grinning as I type this simply because ever so often we are seduced by the star cast - Naseeruddin Shah, in this case - and then we land on our faces when we realise it’s not Naseeruddin Shah in Mandi or Sparsh or even A Wednesday and Ishqiya but the Naseeruddin Shah in The Blueberry Hunt.

In this series, he plays the lonely old king of Shikharwati who has alienated his four daughters, his ‘praja’ and has not paid his property tax for years (how on Earth does that happen? Are tax guys scary only for ordinary folk irl, perhaps?). His trusted secretary/friend is Mishraji - Raghubir Yadav (who just plays himself in all his movies) - who helps him cook up a cockamamie scheme to bring back his daughters, pitting them against one another by offering the winner the kingdom (and every tax liability that comes with it).

Also read: Soha Ali Khan: I did try and impart as much as I could about being a 'rajkumari'

As the title suggests, it’s a gameshow. And before you can say, ‘Let the games begin!’ I wish I had said, ‘Lock kar diya jaye’ and had put the show away in a vault and thrown away the key. But I’m playing Colonel Jessop here, so I watched, and watched until I was numb. Why would the guys who made Scam 1992, even cook up this mess?

The four daughters have their own problems: Lara Dutta is the perfect one, married to a rich guy and seems to have a perfect life until she discovers that he’s not having an affair, but is really bankrupt and her perfect twins are tone deaf… Soha Ali Khan is for some reason made to wear the worst kind of clothes because she lives at some dance ashram that looks like a budget version of Nrityagram or Kalakshetra. Her ambition is to become the head and she has two strange kids who are named Padmasana and Dhanurasana. Barring the brief appearance of the twins in The Shining, precocious kids in movies and shows can be loathsome, and these two are horrendous. The third daughter, and the one that has the best story of the lot, is Kritika Kamra who plays an Insta star but falls because she has a runaway mouth. Obsessed with shopping and her phone, she needs to reinvent herself, and soon. The fourth daughter is allergy central, played by Anya Singh (who has acted in forgettable films like Qaidi Band and Velle). She is accompanied by a constant sneeze and red cheeks which the filmmakers often forget about. She has a video game that needs to be sold, but she’s allergic to SharkTank-like situations too.

The daughters show up at Shikharwati wanting to get their hands on the title and the money. They discover that they have to compete with one another for it by playing games based on the nine rasas. If you don’t know what nine emotions are, you are blessed. And for some reason (and ten episodes of these mindless games will do that to you), they hate each other. Raghubir Yadav keeps calling Naseeruddin Shah ‘king’ and talks in rhyme. Of course you’re supposed to believe the king is eccentric because he aims his gun at his servants who balance everything from a watermelon to a lemon on their terrified heads.

While I groaned through the nine challenges like cooking and table tennis, I did quite like the cartoon villain - an income-tax officer pretending to be the Prince of Mewar - sneaking about Shikharwati in hopes of finding the lost treasure. Varun Thakur plays the cartoony villain pretty well! In fact the funniest line in the whole unfunny business of uniting four daughters who hate one another and their father is in one exchange between Cyrus Sahukar (who plays the bankrupt husband of the eldest daughter Lara Dutta) and the fake Prince of Mewar. It’s the introduction!

‘I am Roop Singh, prince of Mewar,’ Varun Thakur says to the bankrupt husband who has come to Shikharwati to explain things to his wife. Cyrus Sahukar is embarrassed, but without blinking an eye, mumbles, ‘And I am prince of Maharani Bagh…’ This was so unexpected in this horrendous show that you wish whoever wrote that line had written the rest.

It’s clear that Naseeruddin Shah joined the show because they gave him more costume changes (track suits and dressing gowns that matched his PJs) than a Bollywood heroine. Because there’s nothing else to that role. If you are a fan, remember to keep a Monty Python-style vomit bucket handy and never forget, John Travolta whom you loved in Pulp Fiction, chose to act in Broken Arrow too.

Also read: 'Kaun Banegi Shikharwati' is a hodgepodge of a series about dysfunctional royalty