Directors: Puneet Krishna, Amrit Raj Gupta
Writers: Puneet Krishna, Sumit Purohit, Aarti Raval, Karan Vyas
Cast: Manav Kaul, Tillotama Shome, Faisal Malik, Shubhrajyoti Barat, Naina Sareen, Jitin Gulati, Shweta Basu Prasad, Sumit Gulati, Ashok Pathak, Amarjeet Singh
Episodes: 9
Streaming on: Netflix
Tribhuvan Mishra: CA Topper swings for the fences with its pitch: A modest chartered accountant moonlights as a gigolo to make ends (and bodies) meet. It has enough sex, lies and duct tape to be greenlit by a streamer. Only, it emerges that this new Netflix comedy is swinging for the fences in the wrong sport altogether. Tribhuvan Mishra somehow takes that one-liner and turns it into a bloated and sticky nine-hour-long mess. It’s a slog to watch of course, but it’s more heartbreaking than frustrating. I say this because the series – like a prodigy that can grow up to be anyone they want – has the whole world at its feet: A potent idea; a great cast; a fertile setting (Noida); the creative voices behind Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story, Mirzapur and Gullak; the rare ambition to stage sex as a need rather than a commercial aesthetic; and the cultural courage to view it through the prism of female desire. It would take some doing, or undoing, to kill the vibe.
The protagonist, Tribhuvan Mishra (Manav Kaul), is a nice riff on Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi’s Surinder Sahni. He is an honest employee of the Noida Town Planning Board. A lovable “loser”. A naive fool. Except he has a superpower: He’s a selfless machine in bed (his breathless wife mentions this explicitly, lest we doubt his career transition). When he takes up sex work, his Suri morphs into a confident and cool Raj; the body language changes, the financial problems disappear, the shyness is gone. The Shah Rukh Khan hangover doesn’t end there. His favourite client, Bindi (Tillotama Shome), is a Bollywood fanatic who gets turned on by the sight of her real-world ‘heroes’ dancing to, among other things, the Baazigar title track (a nod to Mishra’s double life).