36 Days Is Watchable But Offers Nothing To Commit To Memory

MID-WAY through SonyLiv’s 36 Days, a transwoman decides to blackmail the bully who is married to her friend. “I just want her to be happy, and I won’t let you come in the way,” she tells him, while residing under his roof. It’s a skirmish that reeks of preposterousness. Would adults, however morbid or unhinged, really behave this way? It’s a question that routinely pops up during the 8-episode run of this adaptation of a popular Welsh thriller. 36 Days plays out with its ears to the walls. i.e. it’s intimate, neighbourly and evokes the days of soap-era TV. In effect, it is both the show’s strength and weakness, for it has sufficient layers to unpeel but does so with the grace of a crowbar compared to a book being unfurled in reverse. It’s watchable but offers nothing to commit to memory.

A woman’s murdered body is found in an elite condominium in Goa’s ‘Casa De Magnolia’, thirty-six days after she notably moved in. The show traces the five weeks that prefaced her death, unravelling as a fairly knotty yarn of lies, deceit and mind games. Central to the story, is the strangely overlapping nature of lives shared by an eerily intimate neighbourhood. People know each other from shoulder to shoulder. Such a web of interconnected lives is bound to then be tied together by tender hidden secrets, guilt and in some cases, malice. It sounds soapy, lathered with the kind of parlour tricks that episodic shows are used to pulling off, and while 36 Days does enough to veer away from that template it doesn’t quite travel far enough.  

The series features an ensemble cast including the likes of Purab Kohli, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Sharib Hashmi, Neha Sharma and a bunch of others. Kohli is Dr Rishikesh, a scientist and author who deals in harmless platitudes like “Molecules are like relationships” in surprisingly jam-packed book launch events. He has a sulky wife in Shruti Seth - an instant nostalgia trip, for anyone familiar with the duo’s VJ-ing days. Seth looks substantially aged, while Kohli has that rugged musk of a man hurtling towards a kind of distraught beauty. We know he can act, but he is rarely afforded the kind of material he deserves. Here again, he is woefully underserved, cast as the brooding hunk with a flimsy past.

The performances in 36 Days vary from good to poor. Seth, for example, looks out of her depth in a role that though it demands melancholia ends up feeling snooty and detached. There are plenty of sub-plots to chew on. An ensuing feud between a bully and the transwoman he wants to flick out of sight, a middle-aged man’s battle with trauma, a teenager’s entanglement with a local liquor baron, a drug-smuggling casino manager and so on. There ought to be an anchor to hold such a wide canvas together. A kind of flagstaff that the series builds itself around. Instead what we get is short shrift on a bunch of situations, without any real insight into the people dealing with them. The middle-aged man is classified horny, the manager as naïve, the victim sensual and the intellectual as a regretful hunk. 

Perhaps the only shining light of the series is Chandan Roy Sanyal as the flamboyant, foul-mouthed and often very vulgar Tony. Sanyal plays a kind of masculinity really well, and even though the cultural subtext of a bullish landlord in Goa is missing, his antics, and exaggerations inject the kind of energy that soap dried in the sun could use. He is deranged, loud, classless, touchy and at times, annoying. It’s the kind of role that Sanyal has perfected and to his credit, you don’t mind watching a lot of it over and over again. Maybe that in itself is a comment on the depthless nature of everything else on offer. Though the cast itself doesn’t make you sit up, given the right mix of writing, intrigue and world-building you could have still had a show with as much heft as it has days to recount.

36 Days is another in a long line of adaptations that feel squeezed in rather than expanded upon. The budgetary constraints are palpable, the diminished canvas visible and the writing reeks of theatricality rather than nuance. The series immediately takes you back to Karmma Calling (Disney+Hotstar), another bulky adaptation of another European TV series. Both shows are watchable, yet unadorned by prestige or perspective. That a middle-aged man is quite literally hounded for trying to pleasure himself (the background music effectively punching down on him) is a sign that the creators are far more interested in shovelling morality at you as opposed to using it to explore the terrain of humanity. It’s sellable, on some level maybe even watchable, but hardly memorable.  

36 Days is currently streaming on Sony LIV.