No Redeeming Features:
In the British TV series, Fleabag, the protagonist says this of herself, “I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.”
These words could be describing Maya Ahuja, the titular Good Bad Girl of Abhishek Sengupta’s series, conceptualized and co-produced by Vikas Bahl (on SonyLiv). They even cast an actress who resembles Phoebe Waller-Bridge, with that wide, too-many-teeth kind of smile and slightly unhinged expression. The resemblance ends there, however, as the sly humour and occasionally profound observations of the original cannot be replicated. And the lead character has just no redeeming qualities, nor any plausible reasons for her behavior. It needs smart writing to make such an unappealing woman watchable on screen, not the scattershot approach of this series.
Maya (Samridhi Dewan) works for a law firm headed by Zaina Mistry (Gul Panag) and has a running rivalry with the boss’s brother Sahil (Vaibhav Raj Gupta). There is no indication of Maya being a particularly bright lawyer, and the firm seems to have bottom-of-the-barrel cases, but strut around as if they stepped out of a John Grisham novel! On the verge of being fired, Maya claims to have cancer, just because she went for a routine test and the doctor (Soham Majumdar) suggested a biopsy.
She forges prescriptions, gets facilities and more money out of the sympathy she can get from the fake cancer diagnosis. The boyfriend, Prithvi (Zain Khan), who would have broken up, turns extra solicitous. A video in which she is berating a snooty woman for being nasty to her– a woman battling cancer– goes viral, and Maya suddenly has a lucrative career as an influencer, flogging her cancer survivor status for all its worth.
The series keeps going back to her childhood, where the child nicknamed Bulbul (Aradhya Ajana), always simmering with anger and envy, learns to put on an innocent act and get what she wants from adults with something to hide—like the pervy neighbour (Rajesh Sharma) with a fetish for lingerie. In college, she is mocked by a rich girl Jhilmil (Namrata Sheth) for pretending to be cool, so Maya starts a side hustle of phone sex to make money. Later Jhilmil is inexplicably shown as Maya’s best buddy!
If Maya were to be overcoming odds placed in her way by society—particularly in upper class Delhi –skewed to favour the privileged, and she found imaginative ways of bucking the system, this series would have some interesting aspects. As it is, with a pathological liar and poseur at the centre of the show and in practically every frame, one can’t help but wonder what the makers were thinking. It’s not that there are no people like Maya who lie, cheat and manipulate because they can, but there is no good reason to watch a nine-episode series about her. Writers these days seem to believe that smutty jokes and profanity give the show some kind of contemporary edge; when Maya goes for a mammogram she screams out a MC cussword, people are constantly swearing and flipping the bird, and it is more distasteful than funny.
There is no argument against more independent, sexually liberated, even wicked women in OTT shows, littered by violent and entitled men, but one as despicable as Maya is tough to defend.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
