Koffee With Karan is back. But don’t bother watching, it’s determined to be boring.
Director and producer Karan Johar opens his show with a well-rehearsed and well-delivered monologue. Two lines in it caught my attention: “I am your bio bubble of political incorrectness in a world determined to be boring.”
Strong claim, one might say. And one that had absolutely no backing when it came to the first episode of Koffee With Karan with Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt. Neither was there any political incorrectness, nor any fun— except the part where Ranveer Singh imitates Hrithik Roshan, Varun Dhawan, Kartik Aaryan, Ajay Devgn and Aamir Khan. And we won’t see any of the Khans on the couch either.
Koffee With Karan has chosen to be tone-deaf and has shown absolutely no guts to reinvent itself for a new audience in a changed Bollywood.
Also read: Titillation, titillation, titillation — what Karan Johar’s Koffee with Karan is all about
Ignoring the churn in Bollywood
Karan Johar chose to have a serious conversation with the stars on his couch for no more than two minutes.
Vilification of the industry was brought up early on in the episode, with Johar discussing that he and Bhatt never thought the show would ever come back, because of “whatever happened”.
Johar went on to complain about the ‘snake emoji’ that Koffee with Karan is now associated with. And the conversation more or less was more about the snake emoji than anything else. No substance added, no insights shared from those long days that must’ve been scary for the fraternity – when media, citizens, and other actors pointed fingers. Only Ranveer Singh dared to drop the phrase ‘nepo bias’ twice. Which is ironic.
So boring to see this happen when three people who were directly affected by the smear campaign against Bollywood in the wake of Sushant Singh Rajput’s death were sitting together. Karan Johar was called a ‘murderer’, conspiracy theorists had alleged Alia Bhatt’s father Mahesh had had a role to play, and Deepika Padukone, who happens to be Ranveer Singh’s wife, was also the subject of a WhatsApp chat exposé run by various news channels.
None of this was discussed. Things we really wanted to talk about. Instead, some weird game like Ranveer Bingo and Alia Bingo snatched about 10 minutes of screen time.
Frivolous questions, frivolous answers
Three of four segments were games where intimacy with the star was lost for some frivolous answers they had to give – who is hotter, do you get along with your partner’s exes? And with that, we lost the relevance of Koffee With Karan altogether. A show supposed to be bold is now just trying to stay relevant without doing anything relevant.
The rapid-fire round was also quite forgettable with not one catty piece of gossip coming out of it. God only knows why a staged audience was judging this particular round.
The little bits Alia shared about her relationship with Ranbir, though, were quite cute and something Ralia fans must be thrilled about. Ranveer, on the other hand, has been in a stable relationship and other than talking freely about sex and sexuality he had nothing going on for him. Except for the hamper.
Views are personal.