The Great Weddings of Munnes is an uneven but enjoyable throwback rom-com

Created by Raaj Shaandilyaa and directed by Sunil Subramani, _The Great Weddings of Munnes_ on Voot Select has meaningful connections to two beloved Indian TV shows from the late 1980s, from the Doordarshan era. The premise of the show—one down-on-luck man struggling to find a bride for himself — is pretty close to Ketan Mehta’s show Mr Yogi (1988-89), starring Mohan Gokhale. And the way our protagonist Munnes ( Abhishek Banerjee) day-dreams elaborate, conventionally heroic situations for himself is reminiscent of Raghubir Yadav in the Prakash Jha sitcom Mungerilal Ke Haseen Sapne (1989-90), co-written by the iconic Hindi writer Manohar Shyam Joshi. The reason I bring up these two old shows is that The Great Weddings of Munnes tries, during several episodes, to cultivate some of that ‘slow TV’ vibe, where not everything is an earth-shattering revelation scored to thundering music. And while it doesn’t always succeed, it’s still good to see a show trying to break the contemporary malaise of ‘grab the viewer by the scruff of the neck’. How does it fare, then, overall? I’d say The Great Weddings of Munnes is a quiet, lowkey success that suffers from poor editing choices. To my mind it is about 4 episodes too many—it currently stands at 10 episodes of 35 minutes or so each. I would have chopped that down to 6 or even 5 crisply edited episodes. Much of the show’s appeal is down to the instantly likeable performance by Abhishek Banerjee, who throws everything he has into the role of Munnes, a mild-mannered government employee who officiates hundreds of weddings every month at his registration desk—but is unable to find love for himself. He has “won an Olympics in rejection” as the voiceover helpfully informs us at the beginning. But since this is explicitly escapist fiction, things move quickly: by the end of the first episode Munnes has met, fallen in love with, wooed and proposed to the feisty, outspoken Mahi (Barkha Singh) who takes to his simple, uncomplicated outlook towards life. Of course, cue evil pandit who claims that the two have clashing kundalis or something and hence cannot be married to each other. A lot of episodes tend to have this deus ex machina styled ending—sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. No such problems with Abhishek Banerjee, though. This is an actor who we all thought was at risk of being pigeonholed for a certain kind of character, especially after his masterful role as the taciturn, hammer-wielding assassin Hathoda Tyagi in Amazon Prime Video’s Paatal Lok. But if you look at his work as a whole in the last 4-5 years, you’ll see a lot of diversity. He’s been the loafer hero-ka-dost, who leads to poor life choices and general slacking off. He’s been a shy, introverted lover, he’s been a downright loser and here, he’s a little bit of everything. Munnes is a regular, sweet chap with modest dreams who starts to find his voice as the show progresses, and Banerjee is up for any challenge, as this show proves again. There’s a daydream sequence in the first episode where we see Munnes singing and dancing to a very Govinda/David Dhawan song called ‘Hero Tera’. The song is surprisingly catchy and I was amazed to see how well Banerjee has done here. He looks and sounds nothing like Govinda and yet, for the duration of the song, I was transported back to the late 90s, during the absolute peak of the David Dhawan-Govinda years. Barkha Singh will probably feel short-changed in the somewhat single-note character of Mahi, but she also has a long way to go in terms of diction and dialogue delivery. There’s potential here and she does have an amiable screen presence but TV comedy relies heavily on dialogue delivery at the end of the day, and Barkha’s is only so-so until now. She’s caught out in front of more experienced actors—but she also gets visibly better as the show progresses, which tells me that the learning is already underway. I wasn’t crazy about some of the stylistic experiments The Great Weddings of Munnes attempts in some of the episodes here (a riot story arc is probably not the best idea for a romcom, and the haunted house episode, though a good idea, has very poor execution). But I have to admit that at its best, this is a show that will appeal to a wide range of audiences and definitely qualifies as ‘family viewing’, a la other hits in this space like Gullak and Panchayat. Come for the simple-minded antics, stay for Abhishek Banerjee’s performance.

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.