Mumbai’s Monk:
The series, Monk on which the new show Mistry is based, came out in 2002; almost a quarter of a century ago, it was cute to have a male protagonist have an adoring, female sidekick. Adrian Monk was always accompanied by Sharona, whose role was to carry hand sanitizer and wet tissues for her boss, suffering from OCD, so in the Indian remake, Mistry, that’s what the nurse/assistant Sharanya does. (Today if Karamchand said “Shut up, Kitty,” he would be cancelled.)
However, to prove that current wokeness has not passed it by, Mistry (on JioHotstar) has a Muslim female ACP, Sehmat Siddiqui (Mona Singh), who runs a city police force so incompetent, that they need a consultant to help solve difficult cases. In the show directed by Rishab Seth, written by Aarsh Vora and Ritviq Joshi, adapting Andy Breckman’s original script, other upgrades have been duly carried out – cell phones, computers, CCTV cameras and so on. Mistry is about the genius detective Armaan Mistry (Ram Kapoor), who suffers from severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, after witnessing the murder of his wife (Shraddha Nigam). He has been suspended from the police, and hopes to be reinstated, if his therapist clears him. While Tony Shalhoub played the Sherlock Holmes-inspired character with subtle signs of discomfort with touching people or seeing visible dirt anywhere, Ram Kapoor plays him with excessive twitching and grimacing like a kid with ADHD.
His constant shadow is Sharanya (Shikha Talsania), a single mother with a young son (Vidhan Sharma), who gets to be at the centre of an episode at a resort, where he spots a murder being committed. The first two episodes, like the original Monk, are about the failed assassination of a politician, Mistry being called to help, against the wishes of Sehmat, and his finding connections between two seemingly unrelated cases.
Mistry picks eight of the 13 in Monk’s first season (it ran to 8 seasons with 125 episodes) and Indianises them quite thoroughly. How Mistry deals with a fake psychic, a prank gone wrong, malpractices in a psychiatric hospital and so on, while obsessing about the death of his wife and trying to solve the case, the only one that slipped his grasp and laser-sharp observation.
Since there have been so many crime shows with eccentric detectives—and multiple Sherlock versions—there is not much that is fresh about Mistry, so Kapoor’s comedy act is meant as the chief attraction, which may work for some, but also raises the question about mental illness being treated as a means of amusement for audiences (quite like the recent film Sitaare Zameen Par). Some of the actors who appear in single episodes—like Shishir Sharma as a ghazal singer, Atul Kumar as a psychiatrist, Srishti Dixit as a crime fiction-addicted resort employee, Gagan Dev Riar as a cop accused or murder, add spark to the show, which is mildly entertaining, though not unmissable.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
