A show about the sexism and misogyny faced by a small-town woman in a big city from the company whose founder is facing allegations of repeated sexual harassment: Bisht, Please! has been finally been released into the ether after a two-week delay.
The show missed its original release date after an anonymous blog accused TVF founder Arunabh Kumar of harassing his female colleagues and associates. Two women have filed FIRs against Kumar, who has strenuously denied the accusations.
TVF’s new web series, co-written and performed by Nidhi Bisht and being streamed on the website TVFPlay, revolves around the titular character, a quintessential small-town woman who is secure in the assumption that good things happen to good people until her own life begins to fall apart. Numerous Hindi films and television shows are testament to the fact that stories about women who travel to big bad cities in pursuit of their dreams are a huge hit with Indian audiences. TVF seems to have taken this lesson to heart.
In the first episode, Neetu (Nidhi Bisht) is devastated when she finds out that her live-in boyfriend Donny (Tushar Pandey) is cheating on her because she is “too ordinary for someone like him”. She is determined to dump her errant boyfriend, but after some illogical and highly questionable advice from her colleague Soham (Amol Parashar), she decides to confront Donny and his new girlfriend Parnika (Priyanka Karunakaran) in their swanky apartment.
As the 26-minute episode reaches its conclusion, it is amply evident that Neetu is a pushover who has been kicked around enough and desperately needs new direction.
Nidhi Bisht has loaned more than just her last name to the protagonist. The series is reportedly an exaggerated account of Bisht’s misadventures in Mumbai, which perhaps explains the ease with which Bisht gets under the skin of Neetu’s character.
However, the episode is so preoccupied with defining the contours of Neetu’s personality that it winds up reducing Donny and Parnika to one-dimensional caricatures. Glib and opportunistic Soham (Amol Parashar) escapes this fate, partly because of Parashar’s canny dialogue delivery and relaxed swagger. He also has some of the episode’s wittiest lines, including a monologue in which a computer keyboard doubles up as an allegory of Neetu’s future.
The episode has an uneasy and contradictory relationship with stereotypes. It heavily buys into the ‘simple, small town girl’ cliché, attaching a variety of tautological but largely meaningless adjectives to Neetu, including ‘average’, ‘ordinary’ and ‘simple’. Yet, the episode does highlight how these prejudices and stereotypes are responsible in shaping our ideas about sexism and misogyny.
Bisht, Please! doesn’t seem as effortlessly funny as TVF Tripling, or as endearing as TVF’s popular web series Permanent Roommates, but it slyly weaves in topical quips and manages to establish Neetu’s naiveté without making her seem entirely spineless. Neetu’s journey towards self-empowerment is likely to make for interesting viewing, provided Bisht, Please! resists the temptation to give her a drastic and simplistic makeover.