The series, loosely based on Ravi Subramaniam’s The Bestseller She Wrote, follows the story of novelist Tahir Wazir (Arjan), who is experiencing writer’s block, and how a chance meeting with a fan named Meetu Mathur (Shruti Hassan), turns his life upside down. Tahir chooses to exploit his fan’s narrative for his work to meet his publisher’s expectations. It comes after a social media troll attacked Tahir and Meetu, forcing supercop Mithun Chakraborty to investigate the case.
Attacks grow, individuals die, and viewers find that things may be connected. But the problem is that you figure out what’s going on before half the program is over, and by that time, the mystery was disappeared.
A wise person once remarked that the best indication of good direction is when every performance in a film or television program is superb, from the award-winning lead to the journeyman character actor with a two-line walk-in part. People frequently confuse good directing with visual flair or other types of glitz, but seldom with acting. A competent enough performer may produce an excellent performance despite a bad script.
However, when the entire group is in sync—as in the recent The Power of the Dog or Inglorious Bastards—almost it’s always due to outstanding filmmaking, an indication that the performers were handled by someone who knew what they were doing.
What about the inverse of this theory? Who is to blame when every project performance is uniformly poor? Is this the fault of the director? Or do the issues, particularly in a writer’s medium like television, begin with the script?
There are no easy answers, but watching a show like Prime Video’s Bestseller—a sort of ode to Hindi pulp literature, like Haseen Dillruba and Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhein—you can’t blame regular mortals. You vent your rage at the gods.
Forget about blaming the director (Mukul Abhyankar). Even Meryl Streep couldn’t polish this script, written by Anvita Dutt (Bulbbul, uh oh) and Althea Kaushal, who has worked on films like Happy New Year, Game, and Sonakshi Sinha’s Noor. A formidable track record.
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Forget about blaming the director (Mukul Abhyankar). Even Meryl Streep couldn’t polish this script, written by Anvita Dutt (Bulbbul, uh oh) and Althea Kaushal, who has worked on films like Happy New Year, Game, and Sonakshi Sinha’s Noor. A formidable track record.
I never imagined Prime Video would release anything as heinous as Breathe: Into the Shadows again. Tandav and The Forgotten Army came close, but Bestseller’s all-encompassing incompetence extends beyond Amazon. It’s possible that it’s one of the poorest originals ever made by any mainstream Indian streamer. I’ve also tried Ullu and Hoichoi titles.
Only Gauahar Khan escapes relatively untouched from this disaster, which also stars Shruti Haasan, Arjan Bajwa, Satyajeet Dubey, and Mithun Chakraborty, who is top-billed yet appears for the first time only in episode three.
Four episodes (out of a total of eight) were made available for preview. And it appears like they were written in less time than it takes you to view them. Bestseller, a shrilly played, perplexingly organized, and aggressively awful in every imaginable aspect, has the audacity to call itself a ‘fast-paced, gritty, and compelling psychological thriller.’ But every minute feels like five, and every bit of communication feels personal.
And it’s not as if the program becomes worse as it progresses. It tells you how horrible it is in the first five minutes, which are loaded with exposition so clumsy that it makes Aranyak look like Sacred Games by contrast. It’s almost as if A machine wrote bestseller fed a screenwriting ‘kunji’ rather than by humans.
When we first meet a character, he or she tells what they do for a career to those who should ideally already know. It’s so strange when authors give information in this manner, and it baffles me why so many desi streaming series continue to do so.
For example, in their first moment together, the pulp fiction author Tahir (Bajwa) tells his wife Mayanka (Khan), “Tum 30 second ki ad banati ho, usme 2 second ka dimaag lagta hai, what do you know about creating a full-fledged book?” Tahir, thank you for informing us about what your wife does. But might we have seen her in action instead? This information would have been delivered in the same way but more graciously.
The idea, which I’ve obviously avoided discussing, is around Tahir—a bad, awful writer who also happens to be a lot worse person—and the situation he gets himself into after stealing a fan’s book and passing it off as his own. Haasan portrays the fan, Mithunda plays an ‘eccentric’ cop, and Dubey plays a person whose major duty appears to be gazing into the camera at the conclusion of each episode and deadpanning, “Chapter One,” “Chapter Two,” and, eventually, “Chapter three.”
