Indian television’s biggest fiction show starring Amitabh Bachchan, Kay Kay Menon, Zakir Hussain, Aahana Kumra, Mona Wasu, Sarika, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Ayesha Raza has aired 12 out of the 20 episodes from its first season on Sony Entertainment Television over the last three weeks (Monday through Thursday, 10.30 p.m).
The 140-crore budget show that boasts Anurag Kashyap as the showrunner, also had Shoojit Sircar on the sets to supervise the efforts of director Ribhu Dasgupta, given the scale and stakes involved.
After a slow and rather weak start in the first week, the show picked up momentum in its second week and has finally taken off in the third. While it gets a lot of things right and is certainly a lot better than most shows on Indian TV, Yudh is still frustratingly average, with only bursts of good moments. The good news? There are many such moments in the third week.
The performances — led by Amitabh Bachchan — are refreshingly realistic and the ensemble shows restraint. Full points to the creators for infusing Indian TV with this long-lost sensibility. Even the camera work is quite mature (none of that gimmickry our TV shows are cursed with), the production values better than most others and while it's fairly fast-paced strictly in the context of Indian programming, it is still half as slow as American shows.
There are a few things that don’t work though.
One, the show takes itself way too seriously despite a pulpy script… full of conspiracies, twists and turns, most of which either seem contrived or convenient, almost soap operatic. Two, we have a protagonist who does the most ridiculous things.
Yudh (Bachchan, of course) takes an anonymous tip-off as the word of God in the very first episode and evacuates a government hospital all by himself. How do we root for this dim-witted protagonist full of self-pity who mostly makes bad decisions on impulse?
Each time, his solution to a problem involves making more enemies… which was the DNA of the 2011 TV series Boss , a show that Yudh seems largely inspired by. For a man who shouldn’t stress, Yudh is asking for new problems. The show then ought to have been called How To Make Enemies and Tick Off People.
Then, this show is so full of Amitabh Bachchan as its centerpiece in its first two weeks that when the narrative cuts to the subplots and stories of other characters ever so briefly, they seem irrelevant. Only in the third week does the ensemble seem justified and the sub-plots finally take off.
Finally, the frequency of the show itself. Four days a week with an hour a day is high maintenance given that very little happens. With a tighter cut, it might have been a good ten-episode first season. With just eight episodes remaining and Nawazuddin Siddiqui yet to make an entry, this might just pay off. But given its current format and structure, Yudh is best caught online ( >YouTube and SonyLiv.com )
