Nakaab(MX Player, 8 Episodes)
Starring Gautam Rode, Mallika Sherawat
Directed by Soumik Sen
Rating: 1 star
Just the horror of watching Mallika Sherawat play a Ekta Kapoor clone is enough to put you off all of the streaming platform for at least 3 months.Sherawat, long missing from our poor third world country, has been seen whooping it up in LA and Paris. Either she has ancestral money or a cheap series such as this one pays more than we can imagine.
Under normal circumstances an actor in a series as lowbrow as this can’t afford a decent home in Dharavi let alone Paris. But then , Ms Sherawat is special.She always has been , even now when she’s clearly a has-been.She plays a television producer Zora Mehra.She wears smartly cut executive suits and smokes like a chimney to prove it.
The heroine of Zora’s popular series Vibha Dutta is murdered.And Zora is a prime suspect. Not that she cares. She has a whole battery of minions under her stiletto heels, literally. We see her bully a male associate by first pounding his head on the table for being caught in gay pictures on the social media, and then putting her legs up to his face in a display of power that Ekta Kapoor must try some day.
Soon after Zora/Mallika is necking with Vibha Dutta , in flashbacks which have seen better days. The production values are so poor that it’s hard to say what the characters are feeling.The camera is not just restless but unstable,quite like the characters in this series.
It wouldn’t be right to ask what is wrong with Nakaab. It would be better to ask,what is right with it.The answer is, nothing! Every aspect of this tawdry trashy series deserves to be hooted and booted. The biggest suspense here is not about who killed Vibha Dutta, but who brought Ms Sherawat out of cold storage for this stiff cadaverous act.Her close-ups are horrific. Her dialogue delivery is so stiff she sounds like a weather forecaster on a rainy day.
In the climax Ms Sherawat is required to laugh and smoke at the same time. Clearly the double act is beyond her performing range. Dialogues like, “Aradhana ki Sharmila Tagore ban-na chahti hai tu” don’t help her cause.
More flexible are Esha Gupta and Gautam Rode as cops trying to unravel the Vibha Dutta case. These are actors who at least know their jobs and follow their cues. Not that anyone cares about who did the poor girl in. The people behind this gooey mess deserve to be investigated for culpable homicide. Killing good taste in the name of instant entertainment should be made into a cognizable offence.