Laughably bad and ludicrous from start to finish, Karan Johar delivers another dud—this time for Amazon instead of Netflix.
Akhil Arora, a Film Critics Guild member and a Rotten Tomatoes-certified TV critic, who has watched all eight episodes of Call Me Bae. He has been reviewing movies and TV series since 2015 and has written for NDTV and SlashFilm.
In Call Me Bae—the new Amazon Prime Video series from Four More Shots Please! writer Ishita Moitra—an extraordinarily privileged coddled young woman falls from grace and ends up on the street. (Except she has enough ultra-expensive possessions that she could get by for years by selling them in the open market.) She stumbles her way into TV journalism and, bafflingly, lands the scoop of any reporter’s dreams on the first day of the job. (Moitra clearly has a soft spot for good-looking, fashionably dressed investigative journalists. After working with Sayani Gupta’s Damini Roy in Four More, she concocts another unlikely one in Ananya Panday’s Bella Chowdhary.) In doing so, Call Me Bae needlessly complicates its fish-out-of-water tale.
This could easily have been a show where a woman who has been brought up in a bubble grapples with the pressures of being an adult in the real world. Instead, this fluffy, frivolous Amazon series tries its darndest to be a serious-minded #MeToo drama. It’s an ill fit and Call Me Bae struggles to reconcile that with the rest of its puzzle pieces. On top of that, it’s perfunctory. It’s so unwilling to reckon with our post-#MeToo world that its presence is essentially meaningless. All of Bollywood’s accused are back where they were—if not more secure. What changed? Call Me Bae has no desire to engage with how the #MeToo movement has unfolded in an aggressively patriarchal society like India where men close ranks and protect their abuser friends.
Call Me Bae fails and disappoints across the board
That lack of vision, willingness and commitment runs through Call Me Bae. The direction, by Collin D’Cunha—making his scripted TV fiction debut—is frequently clueless. The Amazon series has no idea how to build to a reveal. Scene construction is atrocious. There’s no anticipation or intrigue. Things just happen. The camerawork, by Anuj Samtani, is at times jarring and doesn’t feel storyboarded. And as a result, the editing, by Antara Lahiri, lacks flow and cohesion.
But none of that is as aggravating as the background score—from Ruuh & Joh—which is so poorly designed that you can feel it switch tracks. Not only is it noticeable, but it also tells you how to feel about any moment in any scene. At times, it pushes you through three different moods and half a dozen instruments in the span of like four seconds. That dictation reeks of a lack of confidence in the direction. I’m speculating here but it seems to me that Lahiri discovered at the edit table that most of Call Me Bae wasn’t working. Unable to get the producers to reshoot the whole thing, she then heavily relied on the sound department to communicate what the director had failed to achieve.
Writing is the biggest crime on Amazon’s Call Me Bae
The most frequent crime, though, is the writing—by Moitra, Samina Motlekar, and Rohit Nair—that dooms Call Me Bae over and over. This is a show where characters are pushed to make childish errors on the writers’ behalf, just so they can push an episode in the direction they wish. Where the dialogue isn’t authentic, indicating the writers can’t imagine how the 1% of the 1% talk. This is a show where a nepo-baby says the line “I’ll do it without the family name.” (The only good joke across eight episodes is a fourth-wall-breaking reference to the comment Panday suffered at a roundtable with Siddhant Chaturvedi.) This is a show that lies to the audience just to get an episode to end at a preconceived side-by-side frame composition, even when it’s not done the legwork to establish it.
This is a show where people say things like “Owl is my spirit animal” and then Call Me Bae deals with it in a flashback that is played straight. Zero hint of how ridiculous that sounds. This is a show where the lead keeps bragging about all the celebrities she knows and the fancy places she’s been to. No one ever points out how annoying it is. This happens the entire season—there is no growth. A smarter, more self-aware show would have the chops to mock all of it. This is a show that is openly hypocritical and refuses to take a stance. It is, at once, pop nationalistic but also fully enamoured by Maldives holidays and Lake Como weddings. And it’s also a show that makes empty corporate synergy references to other Amazon original series.
Watching Call Me Bae, you get the feeling that it was haphazardly and lazily put together as if those involved couldn’t really be bothered. This is a show that should’ve been discarded on the same trash heap as Netflix’s unaired original series, Baahubali: Before the Beginning.
Ananya Panday’s Bae: from South Delhi darling to Mumbai outcast
Born in South Delhi surrounded by generational wealth, Bella “Bae” Rajwansh (Panday) grows up as the spare as her elder brother, Samar (Shiv Masand), is the automatic heir. As a woman, she’s groomed for the marriage market by her mother, Gayatri (Mini Mathur), who picks Agastya “Aggy” Chowdhary (Vihaan Samat) as her husband. Apparently, the Rajwanshes have fallen on hard times and Bae’s dad is facing bankruptcy proceedings. Additional pressure for Bella to get hitched to Agastya. What follows in Call Me Bae is a massively condensed two-rupee version of Bridgerton, replete with an instrumental rendition of a contemporary song, but no understanding of how Bridgerton makes its showstopping sequences work or how it conveys desire through its camera.
Thankfully for Bae, it’s not just a marriage of convenience as the two actually fall in love. Yet, three years later, Bella Chowdhary is super lonely as her marriage has quickly gone downhill. Aggy doesn’t even care about her birthday—the family business comes first. It doesn’t help that she has no real friends except her handbags. Bae spends her days sharing her sad life, packaged to look ravishing, with nonsensical hashtags on Instagram. With Aggy not giving her what she needs, Bae ends up sleeping with her new personal trainer, Paras “Prince” Bhasin (Varun Sood). Caught in the act, she’s kicked out by her husband and disowned by her mother who doesn’t want her “behaviour” to cast aspersions on the family.
Call Me Bae turns rich girl into a #MeToo journalist
Not left with much—except her very expensive clothes, jewellery and suitcases—Bae chases her brother to Mumbai, falsely believing he can fix everything. Soon depressed and out of money, Bae delivers a drunken rant one night against a sensationalist TV news anchor, Satyajit “SS” Sen (Vir Das, playing the kind of “journalist” in Call Me Bae you would normally find screaming at someone like Das on national TV about some manufactured controversy). The video goes viral, and Bae lands an internship at the very channel after running into SS’ less successful rival, Neel Nair (Gurfateh Pirzada). Unlike SS, Neel—the son of a Padma Shri-winning reporter—prefers to stick to the facts and believes Bae’s honesty and gung-ho spirit can be an asset.
As you might already have surmised, Call Me Bae doesn’t really care about how the world of broadcast news operates. To make it worse, Bae lands the story of her life after a Bollywood actress sends her a video in which she accuses a big businessman of blackmail and sexual harassment. Why would anyone pick a viral star who has no experience in the field? I wish journalism was so easy for everyone. The Amazon series also displays a child’s understanding of virality and social media. It’s doubly annoying because Panday was also part of Kho Gaye Hum Kahan. Less than a year after playing a young woman who’s been sucked into the social media validation vortex, Panday plays a young woman who never questions her obsession with her #GramFam in Call Me Bae.
The botched character arcs of Call Me Bae
In an attempt to create a sisterhood, two more female characters—betting-addict hotel trainee Saira Ali (Muskkaan Jaferi) and Bae’s workaholic work bestie, Tammarrah Pawwarh (Niharika Lyra Dutt)—are shoehorned in. But both are handed half-baked arcs and suffer from problems that are either magically resolved or simply laughed off in the finale. They exist first and foremost to serve Bae’s story, with Call Me Bae also meaning to fashion some sort of women empowerment angle. The Amazon series tries hard to make behen-code—behen is Hindi for sister, so it’s a female take on bro-code—happen, replete with hand gestures and reminiscing montages. But it feels tacked on. Panday ultimately gets all the attention.
Das’ character exists as a punching bag. Pirzada’s Neel serves as the on-and-off love interest though the power dynamics of him being Bae’s boss are never properly explored. The only cool thing about it is that it normalises the existence of two central characters who are either separated or divorced. At the same time, Neel’s arc threatens to undermine Call Me Bae. Bae is hired partly to help Neel’s flagging hourlong show and by the end of the eight episodes, his show miraculously recovers, and he’s handed the primetime slot. But the Amazon series doesn’t bother to explain how it happens. Moreover, the timing of it—with Bae delivering on her #MeToo story—makes it feel like the man benefited more than the woman.
Vapid, humourless and an absurd fantasy
A show about sisterhood and rooting for women ends with a man getting an undeserved promotion. It’s unintentionally hilarious. It’s also yet another example of how poorly thought-out Call Me Bae is as if it was designed, greenlit, and finished in a week while everyone was hanging out in a bungalow in Lonavala. There is zero critical energy or thinking here. It pounds the audience with its stupidity until it’s pulled you down to its level. I was left aghast at the deliberate open-ended finale. How dare you ask for more? To be fair, Four More Shots Please! somehow got three seasons, so who’s to say Amazon won’t renew this nonsense?
Vapid, humourless and an absurd fantasy, you can tell Call Me Bae is written by people whose engagement with journalism starts with Instagram and ends with TV news. (That would explain the guest appearance of a former news anchor turned social media journalist.) God bless Karan Johar—an executive producer on Call Me Bae, which is a product of the Dharma banner—who continues to find a home for terrible TV from Netflix to Amazon with zero pushback.
All eight episodes of Call Me Bae released on Friday, September 6 on Prime Video worldwide.
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