Never Kiss Your Best Friend review: A decent antidote to the self-serious, gritty content of today's digital world

Language: Hindi

In a scene from the second season of ZEE5’s Never Kiss Your Best Friend (NKYBF), Tanie tells her uncle Bittu “Iss zamane mein khoon se chithiyan nahi likhte”, in a casual yet restrained moment of profound revelation. How love has changed in our films, in our stories. Bittu, played by the ever-so-charming Jaaved Jaaferi happily accepts this feedback but it is telling that a woke rom-com can so easily drop truth bombs about the way Indian audiences have evolved alongside the stories they consume.

In its first season, NKYBF was a breezy, happily messy rom-com that though flawed and elitist in certain areas (set in London being one), aptly served as an escape route from the grit and grime of OTT’s darkest places. In the second season, there are more first-world problems to be solved, but this time the show does what it was always supposed to do – get lost in the unpredictability of relationships. 

In the second season, Tanie, played by the cheerful Anya Singh is deep into her career as a screenwriter at something called Meraki Studio. The show evidently embraces the notion of working with words for a living with more gusto than anything set in India ever could. People run around talking about characters, scripts and arcs - a world mostly restricted to the city of Mumbai. But to make this world accessible, the show is also populated with peppy extroverts and what is probably the most good-looking line-up of writers, editors and filmmakers assembled anywhere in the world. 

Tanie’s ambition clashes with Sumer, the delightfully light-handed Nakuul Mehta, after the two are forced to share an office and a project. It’s a sensitive and perhaps educated portrayal of love cutting across the lines of work and ambition. What makes NKYBF a millennial or a young show perhaps is the cathartic energy that prevents almost everyone from exercising hesitance as a defence mechanism. Meetings quickly boil over into arguments, thoughts are almost always uttered in the fourth gear and the fluidity of gender politics ensures rather pleasingly, that everyone gets to have a say. It’s the kind of show that renders some obvious conflicts obsolete as if this is the utopia everyone is trying to build towards.

Sarah Jane Dias is believable as the lone woman fronting a media company. Karan Wahi is serviceable as the new handsome writer – with a six-pack of course - on the block, a fantasy most novelists try to import into their work. Everyone else in the series is a bit of a blur because they glow so flawlessly and fall so gracefully, even their crises come across as minor hiccups two spoonful of water would settle. Perhaps that is where the show earns its worth, not by being superior in a technical or performative sense, but by being breezy, maybe even passive through some of its most chastening moments. In the last season, the series tried to grapple with upper-half problems like drugs and grief, but this season it is back to the low-hanging and thus rewarding fruit  – love that mushily unravels between friends.

There is something hearteningly innocent about this show, almost like a 90s dropout having returned without the baggage of that era.
People fall into and out of love, respond not to life’s deep questions but to moments and how these moments make them feel. It’s traditional in some sense, this cross-cutting of wires, friendships, passion and infatuation. And yet in this new language, the lightness of its textures, its hilariously simplistic ideas that feels like the unburdens the narrative of any expectations. Maybe it is crucial here to not have any, go in wanting to get lost in something ordinary, harmless and come away charmed by just how pleasing the simple things can be. Even Tanie’s bits where she breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience, though dated as a concept, works as a disarming device. It makes Tanie’s novelist-turned-screenwriter struggles compatible with her personal life which has its own ebbs and flows.

Part of what works about NKYBF is perhaps, in a cynical sense, its eye-pleasing glossary of actors. Everyone looks 10 on 10. It’s a world of good-looking people, but most of these people come sans egos or annoying personalities.

Often it’s a casting choice that can backfire unless the writing is strong enough to make a case for perfect faces and cosmetic conflicts – or as is done here, look at the world lightly. Do plausible but ultimately forgettable things. The fact that all these people work in the world of entertainment, kind of affirms their approach to life. Beyond some moments where the elitism really jars, or some side actors who fail to carry themselves, for the most part, the show ably sells the world it is set in. As flashy and elusive it seems, NKYBF’s millennial template is a decent antidote to the self-serious, gritty content of most OTT platforms looking for an audience. It doesn’t do anything incredible or memorable, but just the usual things well.

Never Kiss Your Best Friend is streaming on ZEE5

by Manik Sharma