TV REVIEW: Oye! It's Friday

[soniya]

Friday night, Farhan Akhtar made his television debut with the heavily publicised Oye! It's Friday, on NDTV Imagine.


Inspired by the iconic international series Saturday Night Live (SNL), Oye... sees a mix of stand-up comedy, talk show, spoof, skits and live acts by celebrities before a studio audience that cheers incessantly and laughs at the slightest provocation.


What did we expect?
While a number of shows earlier (starting with The Great Indian Comedy Show) have attempted this format, one had great expectations from the Oye… team and particularly Farhan. As a filmmaker and now an actor, Farhan is seen as someone who has effortlessly captured youth imagination; he has his finger firmly on the pulse of the generation that digs his breezy, sparkling and very urbane humour. Moreover, Farhan has always come across as someone who has brought in change, giving cinegoers something new.

And if one stayed true to the format and spirit of SNL, it would mean well-crafted lampoons, crisp fresh punch lines, out of the box ideas for skits, self-deprecating humour and spirited performances by celebrity guests who do not hesitate to make a complete fool of themselves on national TV.


For most of Farhan's fans, Oye... came as a shock and disappointment.


So, what really went wrong?
To begin with, the jokes, spoofs and punch lines were so dated and pedestrian it made you question the average intelligence of the scriptwriter/s. Sample this: "A cow walked in to a police station and sent cops into a tizzy. The cops have released a sketch of the culprit," says Farhan, holding up a sketch of a cow. The script just limped on from one sad PJ to another, from one outdated, banal joke to another. It made one wonder whether the dumbing down was intentional or accidental.

[soniya]

But the worse was yet to come. Hrithik Roshan was the guest for the evening, and showed how Bollywood actors can still be so utterly self-conscious and unwilling to let go on television, which is harsher than the big screen. The skit with Hrithik was so tacky that you did not know where to look.



The entire segment of Hrithik chatting with Farhan was obviously rehearsed but somewhere it seemed there were no attempts to make it look real. Hrithik's responses were exaggerated, like the sequence in the dressing room where he practices his famous Kaho Naa... dance movements. Hello, that's history, as is Jodhaa Akbar. So, the repeated references to these movies were yawn-inducingly boring.


And even as Farhan and Hrithik tried to take potshots at their co-stars and colleagues (Aditya Chopra, Anushka Sharma, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan), they were neither witty nor sarcastic.


Take this for example, while talking about Hrithik's dance s****s, Farhan says, "Daynce" and then corrects himself. This turns into a recurring joke between the two and somehow we are expected to laugh. In between there is a 'magic show' by a very bored looking blonde and her companion, an act by ***y singer Hard Kaur and a boy wonder who played the drums. There was a skit about a cabbie, something about an elephant from Jodhaa... and so on and so forth.