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HomeFeaturesReel TakeUnlike BB Ki Vines, Bhuvan Bam’s Taaza Khabar is sadly a walking,...

Unlike BB Ki Vines, Bhuvan Bam’s Taaza Khabar is sadly a walking, talking cliché

Disney+Hotstar’s series has Bhuvan Bam playing the role of a public toilet manager who has the divine ability to know things way before they occur.

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Nearly eight years after starting his career as YouTuber BB Ki Vines, Bhuvan Bam has finally tried his hand at a bigger-budget OTT project with the Disney+ Hotstar series Taaza Khabar.

But the final results simply don’t match up to the short-form comedy that launched him to online stardom in the first place.

Taaza Khabar’s problems rest on its fanciful yet unoriginal premise, which appears to be a cross between the Disney sitcom That’s So Raven (2003) and poverty porn.

Bam plays the protagonist Vasya, a public washroom manager who lives in a slum with his overworked mother and abusive alcoholic father while struggling to make ends meet. He only wants a better life for himself and his sex worker girlfriend, Madhu.

One night, by being a good Samaritan to an elderly woman who had collapsed in one of his toilets, Vasya receives the divine blessing of knowing about life-changing events hours before they occur.

After 20 odd minutes of the pilot episode pulling out every bleak trick in the book — that induces eye rolls rather than tugging at your heartstrings — the series kickstarts from Vasya’s premise-defining meeting with that ‘mystic’ old woman.


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Weak plot, solid chemistry between characters 

Moving away from the bleakness, Taaza Khabar tries to slowly find its groove in the silly shenanigans centred on Vasya and his best friend Peter, played by Prathamesh Parab. The rest of the series, as such, focuses on the initially-mixed results, inevitably stemming from Vasya figuring out the best use for his predictive news and from the duo’s dreams to make a quick buck.

While Bam is more in his element as a playful toilet manager, the plot and narrative themes remain weak, never giving him and the rest of the cast strong material to mine laughs from.

Instead, the best you can hope for is the solid chemistry between Bam, Parab, and other character actors adding colour to Vasya’s world, especially Deven Bhojani as dhaba owner Mehboob.

Overall, the only running joke that lands comes from the secondary characters, save for Peter, who initially believe that Vasya’s newfound divine ability is just him tripping on cheap drugs.

As a result, Taaza Khabar is as stale as the bread that Mithilesh Chaturvedi’s character accuses Mehboob’s dhaba of selling, failing to hit its stride at any point.

In stark contrast to Bam’s spontaneously satirical work in his early YouTuber days, his web series debut is sadly a walking, talking, clumsily shot and unconvincingly presented cliché.

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Nearly eight years after starting his career as YouTuber BB Ki Vines, Bhuvan Bam has finally tried his hand at a bigger-budget OTT project with the Disney+ Hotstar series Taaza Khabar. But the final results simply don’t match up to the short-form comedy that launched him to online stardom in the first place. Taaza Khabar’s problems rest on...Unlike BB Ki Vines, Bhuvan Bam’s Taaza Khabar is sadly a walking, talking cliché