Netflix’s biggest show is not on Netflix.
This week Netflix, a brand that insists on bright-red exclusivity for its streaming content, put out an episode of India’s Got Latent at the same time as the episode hit YouTube. Created and hosted by comedian Samay Raina, the panel show had been cancelled with massive ruckus last year, with unnecessary FIRs and cyber-crime complaints (and death threats) punctuating yet another war between the distasteful and the easily offended. That outrage, based on bad jokes made by a guest, catapulted Raina to national infamy.
Now here he is, back and more popular than ever, with Alia Bhatt as his first guest and Netflix co-streaming his comeback show—a show where he doesn’t mention Netflix even once. He’s still a leading YouTuber with millions of paying subscribers, while Netflix is one more brand that pays him not to flatter them.
India’s Got Latent gives rookie talents (comics, singers, mimics) the stage for 90 seconds, then grills them. Occasionally someone says something funny, at which point everyone high-fives hysterically. The show is built on the foulmouthed banter between Raina and his panel. It’s schoolboy humour, easily provoking the easily shocked, but Raina—like a younger, hipper Kapil Sharma—is a clever and quick-witted rouser of rabble. Despite the juvenile gaalis, he creates spontaneity. He knows what works and plays to his gallery.
Mileage varies on his guests, many of whom can’t keep up. Alia Bhatt and Sharvari were there to promote their upcoming spy-thriller Alpha, but more than that film, this appearance was a PR-outreach for Bhatt who has recently been slammed by online hate. She’s been raked over the coals for hosting an awards show clumsily, for not making an impact at the Cannes Film Festival, and even for evoking Gone Girl in the wrong context. The knives are out.
Bhatt, to her credit, has dodged these blades before. Back in 2014, after the nation guffawed at her inability to name the President of India on Koffee With Karan, the actor pivoted cannily to a video by comedians AIB that made fun of her own ignorance by showing her wiping her tears with a credit card and learning about electromagnetism by singing “Faraday Faraday”. This felt quietly revolutionary. At a time when Indian actors didn’t laugh at themselves, it was new for a star to take it on the chin and own the meme.
Now, however, laughing at oneself is part of the drill. Once Rahul Dravid got angry in an advertisement, everyone started re-enacting memes as the advertising industry rushed to cash in on trending tomfoolery. Everyone is in on the joke but, alas, everything is so stage-managed that the audience can tell. Therefore when Bhatt claims that she’s not on India’s Got Latent to promote her film and Raina asks her to take off her Alpha baseball cap, there’s no real response. And the cap stays on.
Bhatt, alas, is not funny. Convulsing with forced laughter is not shorthand for self-awareness. She delivered her one-liners so pointily that it became obvious they were scripted, and kept freezing up around people not being reverential toward her. Not only did Raina skewer her sharply—and often dismissively—but one of the contestants, Avinash Agarwal mimicking Donald Trump, apparently made her “too shy” (her words) and somehow rendered her unable to converse with the accent-heavy caricaturist. “Someone get her a script,” the contestant chimed. “And a director.”
Agarwal played Trump to the hilt—and won the episode—while it felt genuinely touching to see young Maharashtrian theatre actor Sukrut Deo play a drunken poet and stay impressively in character as he fended off questions from the panel. “All I ever wanted was an audience,” he sobbed, after a rapturous ovation.
Sharvari seemed to be having a genuinely good time. She came off vivacious, and sporting considering how many jokes were trained at her film Munjya—a breakout success—merely so that jokes could also be levelled at Bhatt’s unsuccessful Jigra.
Raina knows a trainwreck when he sees one. Even after this, he proclaimed, everyone will troll Bhatt. This was the confidence of a man who knows his audience, something he showed in his most recent YouTube special Still Alive. There he spoke movingly about how his mother cried when she saw him during the Latent outrage, and then he said his dad was sending him memes.
For now, it’s all about the memes. It’s sad to see Hindi cinema so desperate to steal virality from other places, casting influencers in movies while asking auditioning actors to bump up their Instagram following. The increasingly blurry line between actor and influencer is best exemplified by Jahnvi Kapoor, an actor without a single commercial success but a mammoth online following.
Despite the money India’s Got Latent makes, there is a homemade quality to it. While Reddit threads remain sceptical about Raina being tamed in order to be conveniently co-opted by the film and streaming world, I hold out hope.
This is because Samay Raina does not seem starry-eyed. While Koffee With Karan has been defanged, and most celebrity interviews and podcasts today feel dictated by PR agencies, there’s a who-cares scruffiness to Raina, who goes to Aryan Khan’s premiere wearing a T-shirt about cruises and drugs. Bollywood—like Netflix, or that India-made phone he’s giving out as a prize on the show—is just another brand. One that he’s selling and one that he doesn’t believe in.
Streaming Tip Of The Week:
One of the year’s finest films, The Sheep Detectives, comes to Amazon Prime on 24 June. Based on a German children’s book, the witty and unexpectedly touching film is about sheep solving a whodunnit. Don’t read any more and just surrender to its woolly charms.
Raja Sen is a critic, screenwriter and columnist. His first play, a murder mystery called The Simla Affair, recently opened in Delhi. He is currently writing a horror film.