For what it’s worth, Seth Rogen in *The Studio* (2025, Apple TV) feels a bit like Larry David—in his own unique way. Take the sixth episode of this sensational series: Seth, playing a beta studio boss, finds himself stuck at a party surrounded by serious doctors who can’t grasp the significance of movies. Only Seth’s truly obsessed!
This kind of obsession isn’t unique to Hollywood—blokes in Bollywood are the same. I try not to mix my friends from the two worlds because one group eventually gets bored through the damn evening.
Shah Rukh Khan’s (SRK) Red Chillies Entertainment, incidentally, produced a film that comes quite close to *Curb Your Enthusiasm* in tone: *Kaamyaab* (2019). This film is a sheer slice of showbiz low life, carried solely on the superb shoulders of Sanjay Mishra, who plays a retired character actor known for one memorable line: “Enjoying life. Aur option kya hai!”
What about SRK’s Red Chillies’ series for Netflix, *The B***ds of Bollywood* (read: *Bads of Bollywood*), set in Mumbai’s movie and entertainment industry? Sure, there are echoes of *Curb*, and even elements of *Entourage*, but more so the filminess of Farah Khan’s *Om Shanti Om*, aiming equally towards the edginess and empathy of Zoya Akhtar’s *Luck By Chance*.
Standing tall as a full-on, fun take on films and filmies, this series is a completely silly, unpretentious, entertaining watch on its own—often switching and playing with genres but mostly staying within over-the-top humour.
Setting a show in Hindi cinema is a tough nut to crack, as many shows end up seeming unbearably superficial (like *Call My Agent: Bollywood*) or simply spoofs of spoofs (such as Emraan Hashmi’s *Showtime*).
What did I love first about *Bads of Bollywood*? That it’s not about a tragic struggler—a trope usually reserved for aspiring actors. Nor is it focused on the boring inner workings of the movie industry. No lay viewer really cares about that. As for the former, aren’t we tired of hearing famous actors’ sob stories about how they once eked out a living by skipping meals and sleeping on pavements, supposedly for a larger social purpose? They were chasing personal dreams—so what? Or that they faced (fair or unfair) rejections. As if the world owes an aspiring actor more than a broke telemarketer.
*Bads of Bollywood* opens with its protagonist, Lakshya Lalwani, already a star—albeit a debutant from Delhi, now in Mumbai—with a popular parallel to SRK himself. He steps into a single-screen theatre to catch his first film, only to exit the cinema to a public tearing his clothes off—straight out of Hrithik Roshan’s life.
What follows is a story showing you never really “make it”! The struggles continue; only the stakes differ. Life takes over.
The hero and heroine (played by Sahher Bambba) first meet at an actor’s roundtable (think Siddhant Chaturvedi) and later at the duty-free shop of a domestic airport. Alongside the hero, there’s the hero’s jobless best friend (Raghav Juyal), mother (Mona Singh), uncle (Manoj Pahwa), and girlfriend’s father (Bobby Deol).
All the actors take their parts seriously, avoiding caricatures typical of comedy. What you get with *Bads* is basically a mainstream, retro Bollywood picture in its own right, but with Bollywood itself as the backdrop—a culture more liberal than the rest of India, less dull than any day job, filled with professional daredevils with no Plan B, packed with internal politics and external targeting.
The commentary, I suspect, is a bit like stock market tips—it’s not so much about what’s being said as who’s saying it. The show’s creator is SRK’s son Aryan Khan, 27 (co-created by Bilal Siddiqi and Manav Chauhan), which adds a unique layer of meta humour.
Take that now-meme-worthy self-referencing scene where a narcotics department sleuth nabbs a DJ (Neville Bharucha) for smoking weed. The DJ protests, “But I’m not from Bollywood,” and is immediately let go!
Aryan generously drops the “N-word”—nepotism—while taking potshots at his own dad, “Dhai Ghante Ka Badshah!”
For a first-timer, he’s filmed what he knows best, making this a sort of Zoya Akhtar-ian debut. Privilege is what you make of it here.
You watch the writer-director smartly placing top cameos—from Aamir Khan, Arshad Warsi, Karan Johar, to Emraan Hashmi—fitting them like chess pieces into a proper plot. The tools of the trade are obviously in abundance.
Here’s a young kid, set free to play with the toys but employing them effectively for movie-screen splendour. Left to itself, *Bads of Bollywood* has as much high-flying action as an average A-grade VFX actioner. Imagine *Fast & Furious* in Mumbai! Let alone the Lamborghinis, you get a motorbike chase down the Bandra-Worli Sea Link!
Did I expect any of this from a supposed low-key parody series about the film fraternity? Frankly, no. I also didn’t expect the *Game of Thrones*-like twist at the end, which cleverly reveals the asterisks in the show’s unusual title.
That, like many of you, was the last thing I loved about *Bads of Bollywood*. So good!
https://www.mid-day.com/news/opinion/article/whats-so-bad-about-bollywood-23595505
