Salt City Review: Under-written, over-dramatised and serves up a curiously bland dish

“You add salt to your whiskey?” “Just like Mumbai, the city that adds salt to everything” We’ve heard some clumsy, lazily-written Mumbai-nostalgia lines in recent times — several lines from Netflix’s Bombay Begums , for example — but this exchange from Rishabh Anupam Sahay’s SonyLiv series _Salt City_ takes the cake. What does “adding salt to everything” — delivered in English, mind you—even mean? Is it a reference to the idiom ‘rubbing salt into the wound’? Is it somehow a food/cooking metaphor (shortly before this line, we are shown the workings of an angithi or a traditional, brazier-style oven)? We don’t know for sure because this is a show where you are supposed to simply… accept the characters for who they are, because there is very little by way of motivation ascribed to them. Salt City is a high-pitched family drama masquerading as a low-key character study. The family in question is the Bajpai parivaar, led by patriarch Harish Bajpai ( Piyush Mishra ) and his wife Triveni (Navni Parihar). The Bajpais have four kids of their own — wannabe entrepreneur and current corporate cog Aman ( Manish Anand ), debt-ridden, emasculated property consultant Nikhil ( Pranay Pachauri ), pot-smoking, free-spirited Saurabh ( Divyenndu Sharma ) and regretful, submissive Esha ( Eisha Chopra ).

The reason why I add succinct descriptions alongside each character is that for the most part, Salt City is supremely disinterested in moving them past these one or two talking points. We never really know how or why, for example, Saurabh harbors such secret animus towards the rest of the family—on the one hand, he is not materialistic at all (despite a scene involving his brother’s Mercedes where Divyenndu excels with his usual, bustling comic energy) but on the other hand he also seems to resent his brothers’ success. That ‘success’ is also tenuous at best, as we discover through the course of the series—the earnest but dogmatic Aman cannot find investors for his dream startup and feels emasculated because his father-in-law is also his boss and he is sick of being patronized by the older man. Hapless Nikhil perhaps has the weakest storyline among all the siblings. He is a ‘property consultant’ but we never see him consulting or even so much as discussing even vaguely-related real estate things.

Worse, Nikhil has a crush on Aman’s wife Gunjan ( Gauahar Khan ) who appears to be playing an edgelord-level game of flirtation with him. She calls Nikhil to her pole dancing class (while also asking him not to mention this to her husband), puts the moves on him aggressively — but also acts horrified when Nikhil appears to reciprocate. The whole scene is bizarrely written and shot, to be honest, alternating between dimly lit soft-porn and Balaji-style soap opera moral disgust. This whole ‘inherently evil/manipulative sister-in-law’ trope should be retired, it’s high time but the makers of Salt City did not get the memo. Gauahar Khan does the best she can with a poorly, even salaciously written role but no actor deserves such short shrift from screenwriters. In a family bursting with dysfunction, it’s only fair that the patriarch has glaring flaws of his own—Piyush Mishra plays the passive-aggressive part of Harish Bajpai pretty well, but is not very convincing as the philandering Harish, who’s having an affair with his own son-in-law Sukesh’s kind-of mother, Vibha ( Nivedita Bhattacharya ) who’s the commissioner at a local family court. Sukesh calls Vibha ‘Dolly ma’ (no, I don’t know why either) and at the beginning of the series, there is a smart one-two maneuver by the director where it is suggested that Vibha is Harish’s wife (of course, a couple of scenes later we discover the truth). A certain sameness has crept into Mishra’s performances these last few years. He’s become prisoner to his own mannerisms and gestures and his inimitable gift of gab. That he plays a somewhat taciturn character does not help things—in the throes of anger, Piyush Mishra resembles nobody more than Piyush Mishra and that becomes a problem for Salt City quite quickly. The only character I unreservedly liked in the show was the Bajpai’s niece Ela, the daughter of Harish’s late brother Pannu. Ela and Saurabh have a sweet, easygoing relationship which develops into a strong, nurturing bond as the show progresses. Their first scene together, smoking pot and talking about Ela’s impending nuptials, is one of the only times you want to spend more time with the Bajpais who can run a family class in ‘passive-aggressive 101’. The show dutifully ends on a cliffhanger and perhaps there’s a season 2 in the offing as well but Salt City will have to do a lot better if it wants to be taken seriously in the Indian OTT space, where the competition is growing more fierce by the year. Salt City is streaming on Sony LIV.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.