New Delhi:
Crafted largely with broad strokes, Name Me Bae, created by Ishita Moitra, co-written by her with Samina Motlekar and Rohit Nair and directed by Collin D’Cunha, just isn’t with out its share of enjoyable and flashes of perception.
It’s one other matter that the terrain that Name me Bae traverses just isn’t immediately and naturally conducive to something greater than the supply of shallow truths about life and manners, and about riches and actuality checks. The present does that a lot, a maybe a bit extra, with satisfactory aptitude.
Ananya Panday toplines the eight-episode Dharmatic Leisure-produced Prime Video India present, a social comedy centred on the trials and tribulations of a dirty wealthy South Delhi woman thrown out into the chilly and compelled to fend for herself in Mumbai.
The character solely sporadically pushes Panday out of her consolation zone. However to her credit score, she grabs the ample alternative for evolution that the long-form story and the sure-handed writing provide her. She etches out a relatable determine who’s price rooting for although the present doesn’t provide a lot by means of illuminating epiphanies.
For Bella Chowdhary aka Bae, born into wealth and married into much more wealth, there is no such thing as a such factor as “an excessive amount of bling”. Early on within the sequence, her household is on the verge of chapter. Her marital liaison with the scion of a thriving enterprise empire saves her dad and mom from turning center class.
However when the whole lot appears to be sorted, life takes an sudden and sad flip. Bae finds herself out of favour together with her Richie Wealthy husband. Her entry to all the cash that was hers for the asking is reduce off and he or she is compelled to depart Delhi and set herself up in Mumbai.
Do outdated habits die simple? Not for Bae. She doesn’t rid herself of her obsession with designer garments and accoutrements. Not that Name Me Bae places the charmed heroine by means of the form of grind that lesser mortals should countenance day in and time out with a purpose to merely make ends meet.
Bae doesn’t precisely slum it out. The worst that occurs to her is that she has to search for a job, share a flat with a colleague, commute in an autorickshaw and deign to eat vada-pav on the seaside (however not earlier than sanitising the bench on which she sits).
The casting is salutary. Ananya Panday feeds off Bae and vice-versa. The protagonist, like a real-life star child, is so accustomed to her uber-luxe cocoon that when she steps out of the protecting bubble created by her doting and calculative mom (Mini Mathur) and a husband (Vihaan Samat) who denies her nothing besides his consideration, and encounters the actual world, she continues to be infinitely higher off materially than most of us ever can be at the perfect of instances.
In a meta dig at an Ananya Panday utterance that turned a meme and went viral, a residential complicated safety guard quips that he can be blissful to achieve the place Bae’s majboori begins. The girl’s response to that remark – the place have I heard that one earlier than? – not solely collapses, for a fleeting second, the wall between the fictional and the precise, however can also be an instance of the self-deprecating humour that’s strewn throughout Name Me Bae.
The writing is mostly vibrant and the story gallops at a good clip. A panoply of individuals surrounds Bae as she makes her manner by means of the tough and tumble of a metropolis not her personal. The present follows her transformation into a lady who learns to surmount reverses and hurdles and discover buddies, goal and gumption.
Name Me Bae alternates between the agreeably breezy and the gratuitously flippant in its seek for a story median that may maintain the present collectively. The move will not be constant however the mix of drollery and solemnity works for essentially the most half.
Name Me Bae turns lethal critical in its closing quarter when the heroine takes it upon herself to show an unholy nexus between the mainstream media and a company entity whose head honcho is not what he claims to be.
When Bae’s picture-perfect life is marred by an act of indiscretion and the kneejerk response to it by her husband and he or she is compelled to department out on her personal, the primary few episodes preserve the viewers invested in her plight. Only a trace of monotony creeps in thereafter nevertheless it doesn’t everlasting or main harm.
As is customary in tales of this nature, Bae takes subsequent to no time to find soulmates who stand by her by means of thick and skinny. 5-star lodge worker Saira Ali (Muskkan Jaferi) is the primary. Bae items her an LV Sarah pockets, an act that seems to be a blessing in disguise in the long term.
Bae lands a job with out an excessive amount of of a battle at a information channel, the place she rapidly befriends a junior reporter (Niharika Lyra Dutt) who is aware of her thoughts. Just a few episodes in, she additionally makes frequent trigger with an actress (Sayani Gupta, in an prolonged cameo that makes a mark) who has a narrative to share with the world.
The women kind a coven that offers them the energy to navigate their very own flaws – each Bae and Saira have critical ones – and chase away the boastful methods of Satyajit Sen aka SS (Vir Das), who hosts the channel’s principal primetime present. He’s a douchebag who hides the stink he exudes behind a veneer of corrosive cockiness. Das’s efficiency is without doubt one of the highlights of the present.
Not all the lads round Bae are despicable louts. Considered one of them, Neel N. (Gurfateh Pirzada), swears by the virtues of great journalism and stands up in opposition to the sensationalism that SS peddles. He instils in Bae the idea that “the story is all the time greater than the journalist”.
The person who sweeps Bae off her ft and sparks hassle in her paradise – movie star health club coach Prince (Varun Sood) – doubles up as a tech whiz and moral hacker when push involves shove. He seems to be her biggest ally when troubles start to pile up.
Any person advises Bae to modify off her TV set if “you’re on the lookout for actual journalism… it isn’t on TV anymore”. It isn’t identified whether or not Bae pays heed to that suggestion, however in case you are on the lookout for something aside from a number of hours of frothy leisure, Name Me Bae will not be for you. A contact frivolous it could be, however the sequence definitely is not irredeemably vapid or vacuous.
