What The Love!: Karan Johar's Queer Eye-style show on Netflix tries to be woke but ends up reaffirming stereotypes

Love is complicated. Sometimes, it is sharp around the edges, dappled with layers of “tera mera rishta kya.” Often it takes years to find through heartbreaking labour and deconstruction of self. More often than not, it resides not in one person, but in a patchwork of lovers intertwining at different periods of time in life. But most of the time, it is habit-forming and mundane, and rid of grand gestures.

However, on What The Love! — Karan Johar’s fondue of a series on Netflix — it seems love, yes,  love, can be found with a bit of a deliberate messing up of the hair (because women apparently dig that) and ditching the dumpy kurtas (“pink whale which is going to swallow you”) for waist-accentuating daywear.

[caption id=“attachment_7935501” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] A still from What the Love!. YouTube[/caption]

I am not a regular consumer of cringe TV but I love it, of course. I recently watched Skulls and Roses , drawn to the dating drama like a tourist to cheap souvenir fridge magnets. I was even forced to watch a few episodes of Bigg Boss because of angry Siddharth Shukla fans, who descended on my timeline, and made a hashtag targeting me and a few other women trend on Twitter with a million tweets under it (true story, look up the hashtag #ApologiseToSiddharthShukla ). It was 48 hours of sniveling petulance alternating with abusive name-calling from handles that assumed we were the natural enemies of hridaysamrat. Yes, cringe TV amuses me, especially if the PR surrounding it has unintentional drama.

But nothing could have thrown the gap between the world Johar inhabits and how ordinary people date in sharper relief than What The Love!, Johar’s seven-episode show on Netflix to make young men and women love-ready in _Queer Eye-_style. Is anyone ever ready for love after two dates with two different people? But even if we suspend logic, the show borders on regressive in the way it proposes simple fixes for complex problems related to love and dating, with no caveats for any of the real life issues that come up for both in the form of finances, physical safety, and managing expectations.

If there is one thing Johar does well, it’s goss. He knows everyone; everyone knows and loves him; he loves that people will give an arm and a leg to sit on his plush couch and diss on co-stars. And tabloids spin stories for days around these episodes. He is in his element, hosting people who are camera-trained and unnervingly disconnected from political realities of India. That is his genre as far as TV is concerned. He is considered something of an authority when it comes to the portrayal of love and drama. There were references to his larger-than-life films several times, politely dispelled by Johar himself , as not rooted in reality. If Johar’s films alone were the reason behind his taking up the role of Love Guru in this show, it would be problematic. His films are not exactly the picture of modern love.

Which is why I am most intrigued that What The Love! aired at a time when the streets are alive with young people protesting, dissenting, holding up posters and drawn memes, walking in solidarity, making human chains, holding hands, sitting in, tweeting, shouting slogans at cops, loving fiercely, wanting to change themselves, reading the Preamble, singing Faiz, and most importantly redefining every established norm that stereotypes them as uninitiated, lazy, self-absorbed or unaware. Why then would a shrewd content marketer, in times such as these, choose to format a show with such poor understanding of how to address issues around gender violence, relationship, body image, sex, and sexuality? When I saw the pilot episode, I wanted to believe that sex and sexuality would be a part of the conversation — two of the key issues in modern dating that determine short and long-term physical and emotional well-being. They were not.

I was aghast to see the conversations around sexual violence, the loneliness of being gay in a country where homosexuality is not uniformly accepted across all urban and rural spaces, and self expression was stripped off of all nuance to make candidates fit into the boxes the makers already have planned for them. Thus, a man who says he is shy is told dismissively that women desire men who take the driver’s seat and make the first move; a woman who spent a considerable time explaining how she has been rejected 11 times in a row is brought to a finale where she is put in an exactly similar situation; a flamboyant gay man, instead of being asked to live his best life, is told not to be intimidating with his choice of clothes and paired with a heterosexual male actor who seems uncomfortable in the given situation. It does not end there. The candidate, Rabanne, is stood up by his date, a moment made more unbelievable by the fact that these glossy, urban people were handpicked by Johar (who plans elaborate and expensive first dates with yachts and trucks and champagne on floats?) Johar calls the man back to his show to explain his disappearing act.

A caste reference is allowed to pass uncensored. A woman who says she is conscious of her weight is made to face her wardrobe. By the last episode, I felt almost a spark of anger when a man, whose claim to fame is having traveled to over 70 countries, and a clear lack of awareness of his own privilege, admits to being intimidated (prompted by Johar) by a woman with a strong personality — an opera singer and dancer who is clearly unintimidated by him. He eventually chooses a woman who is taken aback, but not offended, when he tells her his desire of being a father by the time he is 30 — a topic that should have raised a red flag on any first date. He admits to “wanting a woman who will be both family-oriented and would like to party with him because he parties a lot.” What was worrying to see was the lack of strong intervention (or edits) on behalf of the makers on regressive gender role expectations of urban, privileged men. It is the worst possible use of a big platform.

Think of the stereotypes of what love is supposed to look like as a modern adaptation of a Mills & Boon romance, and you will have your answer. No amount of what the stylists on the show call “shamazing” can compensate for just how mechanical the wokeness is in this cringefest. The only two moments of genuineness were the interaction of Saif Ali Khan with one of the candidates, where he brought in old-fashioned charm and politeness to the conversation. And one in which Johar opened up on his own sexual experiences in the past — a fleeting glimpse into the vulnerability of a man everyone acknowledges as a master of an inherited show business.