Gullak Season 3 review: SonyLIV show's nostalgia-centred escape route now feels tiresome, redundant

Language: Hindi There aren’t many shows in the OTT space that romanticise middle-class jugglery the way Sony Liv’s Gullak does. The Mishras find happiness and conflict in the little things, rarely unpeeling layers of the socio-political oppression that makes living, adjacent to the bottom line, so difficult in this country. Gullak has found a way of somewhat fetishising the lack of privilege and it says something about its episode length anecdotal inquiries into middle-class shenanigans that it manages to somehow still keep cynicism at bay. It’s as if an Indian soap has acquired the indie sensibility of something more realistic and can therefore find a way to mix both. In its third season though Gullak is more languid, evidently struggling to fit new slices from small-town life into episodic circular narratives it has come to be known for. It’s the third season syndrome maybe that the show about convenient, eccentric escape routes feels a bit tiresome and pushed to the brink of having to reluctantly grow up and exit the loop of convenience. The second episode of the third season focuses on LTA (Leave Travel Allowance), the famed lottery that most working-class families know of but seldom experience. Another episode in this new season is about an arranged marriage that has to be aborted after Mummy Mishra, hesitantly, sounds the alarm on an ill-conceived partnership (after she reads the girl’s mind of course). There will of course be a marriage, a merger of interests rather than desires, but the illusion of withdrawal is what the show has come to master. It offers moments as revelatory life-altering devices rather than the missteps that they would otherwise serve as in reality. This season ends with a sobering hurdle that has the Mishra family clutching at straws and clinging to the sheets in both horror and revulsion; the first time the show throws the sink at the Mishra family in what is also its first real encounter with the world, as a force. A force we have so far candidly by-passed for the sake of the family’s innocence. It’s impossible though, in real life, to nurture conflict without addressing it.

The performances in Gullak have never disappointed and even in a somewhat underwhelming third season Annu, Shanti, Aman and Santosh continue to be the affable family next door. Jameel Khan is casually brilliant as the soft yet righteous patriarch of the house. Khan has, over the course of the three seasons, effortlessly conveyed his conflicting position as the hapless leader of an overbearing, loud household. He owns his responsibilities but rarely uses them to acquire power. In this season, his lack of agency is finally tested. It’s a tender, endearing role that encapsulates the futility of honour in the dog-eat-dog world of working-class India, in which, Santosh Mishra continues to scour for a life of dignity. Vaibhav Raj Gupta’s Annu Mishra emerged as the star of the show in the last season and here in the last few episodes, he again soars to occupy the position of the family’s street-smart and maybe even mature, member. In a scene from the last episode, he chugs a bad cup of tea, intentionally, as if to symbolically mark his coming of age. Maybe a bad cup of tea a day is what it takes to keep the great Indian family together. It’s a position you don’t necessarily apply for but graduate to nonetheless. “Humare mann ka swaad khraab hai,” Annu says in what is perhaps a first, understated outburst against the invisibility of the system that makes Gullak escapist, maybe even delusional at times. It’s a scene that tells you that while the show has carpeted over some serious contemplative questions about life in general there has always been this pointed energy poking at its ceiling from underneath.

Gullak’s third season attempts to embody the larger-than-life messaging of its episodic epiphanies but it has evidently run out of nostalgia trips to travel back to.

Each episode, almost half-an-hour long feels too long for the first time as the redundancy of character eccentricities begins to bear down on familiar, topical pieces out of a small-town comic book.  Most conflicts in this new season feel forced rather than organically achieved. The quirkiness of the world now sits on the show’s nose as an excuse to paint a world the creators are struggling to do justice to. Once you buy wholeheartedly into the nostalgia-as-centre-piece format, it is evidently difficult to step out of its shadow and meet the present day with all its burdens and luggage to boot. It’s where Gullak thinks it has finally come of age by offering real conflict for a change but it is also where its legacy ends, as being the show that casually helps you escape that which is real, to a place that we would all like to believe exists, as much in real, as it does in memory. Gullak is available to stream on SonyLIV

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.