Call My Agent Bollywood

Absolutely, the worst of everything. Period. Since the review requires at least 150 characters, let me reiterate, absolutely, the worst of everything.

I am a massive fan of the original french series. It has heart, emotions and comedy all packaged together in a nice, easy to digest show that doesn't demand you to pay a lot of attention. This adaptation, however, seems to be a massive oversight on the part of the writers. The script is incredibly shallow and lack any sort of depth. The dialogue are trite. The shift in tone from the original series is surprising, I go even as far as to say that it feels like an afterthought. The attempts to include the typical bollywood tropes seems really hacky and to no one's surprise extremely unfunny and vapid. The performances weren't as bad as the script but not good enough the save this disaster.

This show will never be close to the original French one. Actors are so overacting and so much dramas. Its like watching one of those hindi TV serials all over again. Expected much more standards for shows from Netflix. Its clearly showing bollywood is losing all the good acting shows and stories and even good actors.

I generally like to start reviews with the good things but to be honest this show other than introducing the general audience to the original has no other positive things going in it's favour.

When I saw the first episode of the French show I thought it would be fun to watch the bollywood version of that because of all the name dropping and other references we would get of bollywood that I completely missed out in the French version.

Not only did we not get any good bollywood references or inside jokes. This series even fails to mimic the emotions the original show was trying to portray.

Writing - We know the plot works as we've seen it work in the original show. So what fails here is the dialogues. The dialogues feel like literal translations of the English subtitles. Also the fact that the shows is dubbed later and the on set sound not used makes the dialogue feel unnatural.

Art - The set feels very fake. The lighting is not natural. The backdrop in the windows are clearly fake. Maybe I'm nitpicking too much but it bothered me atleast.

Actors - The curly haired assistant is the only one who worked for me honestly. Even though the cast is star packed the show fails to make an effect like the original did.

Direction - This is where the shows lacks the most. The one shots and the lack of cut aways instead of elevating the episode really ruins the important emotional points in the show. Also bollywood is synonymous with mumbai so not using mumbai in main scenes and just using them as transitions really lowers the quality of production.

TLDR; Non existant name dropping, bad art, bad dialogues and most importantly bad directing makes this show a very bad remake of a good show.

There's a scene in the second or third episode where farah khan wants to direct these actors in the movie, and seeing their intensity during the audition, she exclaims something like, we are making something commercial, we only want to scratch the surface of the emotions you are showing. And that's it. That's the entire series. They have commercialised the original series to such an absurd extent that it makes you wonder why did they insist on copying not just the plot lines, but the dialogues, word to word. What works for paris doesn't necessarily have to work for mumbai, which is not a bad thing; better stories could have been written, keeping the same characters in mind. Instead we get a ham-fisted xerox of the original, that really makes you question the point of watching this when the far superior version exists just a click away.