Lionsgate has chosen the bold way to enter the Indian market with its maiden venture Hiccups & Hookups streaming now on the Lionsgate Play platform.
Touted to be a romantic family comedy-drama, this 8-episode series dwells on relationship blues bordering on liberalization, sexual preferences, amidst a lot of drama.
Synopsis
Vasudha (Lara Dutta) lives with his brother Akhil (Prateik Babbar) after the partial break-up with her husband Dhruv (Khalid Siddique) who was caught sleeping with his assistant.
The online dating app partnered by Akhil comes in handy for both siblings who use it to the hilt not only for testing its compatibility but also to explore and turn their wild fantasies into a reality.
Kavanya (Shinnova), the college-going teenage daughter of Vasu, too falls in the line in dating her boyfriend and joins the marathon training session following her crush on the hunk like trainer. But could not make it to the couch level as desired due to some abnormal development.
So it’s all about hookups and nothing else as clearly suggested by the title itself and the mess that followed after every hookup is what this series is all about.
Performances
The potential actors like Lara Dutta and Prateik Babbar were wasted phenomenally in this awkward series which doesn’t offer them enough space to perform despite their all out effort to do something better.
The new face Shinnova though looked pretty had nothing to do except to get smooched or wanting to get one always with a forlorn expression on her face.
Meiyang Chang is another actor who was wasted in an inconsequential role that doesn’t do anything good for him.
All other actors, Meera Chopra as Fatty Fatima who drools over the sound of that three-letter word, Ayn Zoya as Ila who behaves as if she was an alien reiterating all the time that she was different in everything she does, and to top it all there’s Mukesh Chhabra as Satvik who intentionally overdoes thus becoming another source of severe pain in the neck.
Behind the scenes
Adopted from the American comedy TV series Casual, Hiccups & Hookups project the nuances of casual relationships, one-night stands, and dating et al rather brazenly without any inhibitions.
The series was written by Indira Bisht and Divyanshu Malhotra to present an outright adult comedy that fails to impress due to senseless screenplay and lopsided presentation.
The director Kunal Kohli too could not give fair treatment to a bizarre story that doesn’t do justice either to comedy or romance and ends up hanging in between leaving a big lump inside the throat in the end.
The scenes were illogical, sequences look like copy-paste jobs without any shade of emotional connectivity among the characters.
Among these stumbling blocks, the background score by Sneha Khanwalkar stands out to produce great relief and this was the only redeeming feature of the whole series.
Final Verdict
An outlandish mashup of urban insecurities is what this series conveys and it would be a gross waste of time unless you had plenty of that to kill, then this would be ideal for you.
To ape the shows that emerge from an entirely different cultural background and try to project them as representation of our own by dipping it in a colour of sentiment as happened in the case of Hiccups & Hookups was not the right thing to do. Also the danger of getting misfired is imminent in such instances. So it’s better to add some nativity at least to avoid such mishaps.