Feels Like Home Season 1 review: A tiresome tale of four entitled collegians and a lot of debauchery

2/5

Story: Four collegians, Lakshay Kochar (Prit Kamani), Avinash Arora (Vishnu Kaushal), Sameer Ahmed (Anshuman Malhotra) and fresh-from-Ghana-import Akhil Gandhi (Mihir Ahuja), live together in a rented mansion in Delhi. Lakshay is the resident party animal, while Avinash comes a close second. Sameer is a budding poet with performance anxiety, while Akhil, Ghana’s best under-19 cricketer has come to be the best here too. Feels Like Home is an intimate look into the lives of these four friends.

Review: Feels like Home is meant to be a situational comedy that plays out primarily in the plush mansion shared by four collegians, Lakshay, Avinash, Sameer and Akhil. This is a quartet of entitled brats, who can not only afford said accommodation, but also eat, drink, make merry and repeat, every single night (and day). They even have a housekeeper to clean up the mess left behind and cook. That’s quite the privileged life, I’d say.

But life ain’t all that rosy for these four – they have first world problems, you see. Lakshay, whose life is all about debauchery, scratching his ass and balls and taking in deep breaths of his ‘intoxicating’ smell, feels ‘neglected’ by his family, Avinash will have to return to Chandigarh and run his family business of selling tyres if he flunks in too many subjects, Sameer not only has issues with his army-man father, but is also a budding poet who doesn’t have the nerve to let an audience hear his words, while Akhil is not sure if he is ready to make it to the college cricket team. That’s deep, right!

The show tries desperately to have an irreverent tone, especially in the way these four talk – every second word is an expletive; how they prance around semi-naked (there’s a brief naked butt shot early on) or ‘joke’ about their ‘privates’ every now and then. It’s also fairly flippant about sex, Akhil’s NRI status makes him exotic enough to lose his virginity, while on-the-rebound Avinash is able to sweet-talk a girl into having sex with him and then not even look her in the face the next morning. And all this, interestingly, takes place at Lakshay’s home, where his sister is getting married the next day.

The problem with Feels Like Home is that it tries very hard to look and feel cool – it tries, but never quite manages to achieve some semblance of it. It’s a show about boys for boys only, it would seem.

Verdict: If this was meant to be a coming-of-age drama, what with the odd life lessons thrown in the six episodes, that’s a massive misfire. What’s worse is that it’s not consistently funny or entertaining enough to make for an engrossing viewing.