Ever since I came to Mumbai, I have been hearing the word ‘Struggler’ being thrown around in almost all day-to-day conversations, probably because I am one as well - a struggler. The urban meaning of the word is: ‘One who fails at life or nears failure completing everyday tasks’ or simply put: ‘One who sucks at life.’ As every second person you come across, in Mumbai, is an aspiring actor, and an actor’s life is largely composed of failures and rejections, at least until he/she gets a major break, the word ‘struggler’ has been used interchangeably with ‘actor’ since time immemorial.
Produced by SaReGaMa India Ltd. (RP – Sanjiv Goenka Group), the series is presented by Ditto TV, the digital arm of Zee Entertainment Enterprise Limited. The lead actors are Meherzaan Mazda, Vaibhav Raj Gupta and Ajay Jadhav, who are all playing aspiring actors with the exception of Errol Marks, who is an aspiring writer which is again per se ‘struggler’.
Being a member of the same herd, I started watching this episode with gusto but sadly, the episode drained me. It was 19 minutes of sheer predictability. The title and subtitle itself reveals the plot: Strugglers…making of an Indie Adult Film. So there are four actors (or 3 actors and one writer to be precise) who are struggling to make their way into Bollywood and since that doesn’t seem to be happening they decide to make a porn film, independently. The whole first episode is a prologue to this one liner which was, IMAO, uncalled for. The series director, Siddharth Anand Kumar, could have rather adopted a non-linear storytelling style and start the episode right from the mess they were in as a result of their porn-film making decision and then gone back to justify their actions in bits and pieces. That ways, the first episode would have acted like an opening hook and the viewers would have been saved from an already predictable arduous prologue. But hey, who am I to say?
Having said all that, the episode wasn’t entirely devoid of epic moments. Vaibhav’s conversation with his concerned mother over the phone (who sounded totally fake by the way) right in the beginning should jolt out one or two laughs from average minds…especially when the phone is disconnected just as Vaibhav asks for money. The auto driver’s advice to Errol to develop a ‘NAAGIN’ script felt original as well. Errol’s ‘L-word’ analogy was also epic. The acting on the whole, felt unnatural, although it can be fixed by pacing up the dialogues a tad. Meherzan’s episode with the cheesy casting director was just wayyyy…over the top. I mean yeah, if the series is about struggling actors then how can one NOT put at least one scene of ‘casting couch’ but then a female casting director couching on your lap in an open audition room? Come on now, that was substandard.
The biggest tragedy however, is that the series is not available for free. It streams exclusively on Ditto TV for paid subscribers and the first episode was a mere sneak preview and let me tell you, it wasn’t a commendable one. So I doubt whether people would actually pay to watch the remaining episodes. I wouldn’t. Plus, if they had to make it paid, then why not present the whole series as paid content on youtube itself? It’s not like they don’t have a thousand subscribers. People are accustomed to watching in youtube, especially since the videos don’t buffer anymore. So, who would step out of the comfy youtube interface and stream someplace else? Sorry guys, nothing personal, but it’s a thumb down.
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