PremiumPrimetime With Murthys Series Review: Shallow and clickbait narratives cannot make up for a fulfilling watch
Primetime With Murthys Series Review: Set during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, the series delves into the lives of a family of four, with each grappling with their own issues.
Last Updated: 11.10 AM, Jul 12, 2024
Primetime With Murthys plot
Somewhere in a throbbing and posh gated community in Bengaluru, is an English-speaking family of four. Well-to-do, and privileged enough to keep themselves not only afloat (during the Covid-19 lockdown) but also scramble over their first-world problems, like being confused about whether to keep the apartment meetings online or offline. We are also introduced to each family member. Developer Manohar Moorthy (Preetam Koilpillai) lives with his wife Sushma (Sukhita Aiyar), the apartment chairperson. They have two children, daughter Nisha (Sanjana Doss), an aspiring actor and social media influencer, and geeky son Shiv (Amrith Jayan), who assumes a fake name to be a famous troller on the internet. With each passing day, the prime-time news being the only companion for the family to let the news from the outside world enter their luxurious abode, the series concentrates on how each of them grapples with their issues.
Primetime With Murthys review
Let’s get one thing straight before we go into analysing what worked and didn’t in Primetime With Murthys. Subtlety and empathy left the room when the show starts, simply because it takes time and again to stress how hard it is to make three reels a day and find worthy content to post but conveniently brushes in the dialogue “five years from now you and I would be laughing about it” when an employee is getting laid off during the pandemic.
As much as the series tries to use primetime debates and how sometimes news channels can blow up matters out of proportion, it is also evident that the series uses the same method to exaggerate skit sketches that lack any sort of depth and understanding. It also becomes a matter of obsoleteness when the series is set just during the first lockdown, when the country has already grappled with multiple of them and just seems to getting back on heels. But nevertheless, even if you wish to buy the Murthys’ world, it never seems relatable, when characters are given superficial characterisations and exaggerated subplots to explore.
To start with, the series uses the television reporting of the suicide of a famous Bollywood actor who died during the lockdown, as a running narrative. The news channels are screaming how the actor “committed suicide”, while on the other hand is the influencer daughter dejected that a “dead actor is stealing her thunder”. Well, not just being politically correct, but also empathy goes for a toss in the series, which may seem to make a satire on today’s content-driven landscape, but fails in the task by being one.
Through the course of the series, we travel with all four characters, who seem to be facing monsters of their own. If Nisha wants to make it big as a star, there is Shiv, who goes undercover on the internet to talk about what the truth is. For a father whose work from home suffers a blow, there is a mother who wishes to keep her family together always. The series barely is able to make us understand the trials and tribulations of these characters, that it gets hard to feel for them when they suffer a loss or defeat. Further, unwanted tracks keep getting mid-way, one being Nisha’s seemingly ex-flame, showing interest in her, only to leave her further confused when he tells her that he is into boys. We don’t get a resolution for it, nor are we told what is the point of the track.
Primetime With Murthys is a mixed bag of lazy and shallow writing. We don’t see an organic growth with these characters whatsoever, despite each of them going through what the writer wanted as turmoil of emotions. The series grazes on topics like layoffs, social media culture, clickbait content, and fame, but they are so surface-level that it feels like the whole series can be summed up into a 30-second reel.
Primetime With Murthys verdict
The six episodes of Primetime With Murthys, although want to be your kindred spirits and talk about the close-knit nature of an Indian family, fail to evoke any kind of emotion. The characters are hardly relatable and the world they try to set up, seems to be far removed from what the normal would have experienced during the actual difficult times of the pandemic.
Primetime With Murthys is streaming on JioCinema.