The prospect of watching a new Shefali Shah performance

Shefali Shah would make for a terrific supervillain. Just not this time


The prospect of watching a new Shefali Shah performance is always an exciting one. The new series Human, streaming on DisneyPlusHotstar, features the maddeningly expressive actor as Dr Gauri Nath - a celebrity surgeon renowned for her brilliance and benevolence, but with a dark side that’s hidden from most. More on the character and the actor later.


This show displays what seems to be a persistent problem with so many Hindi OTT shows, particularly those made by filmmakers moving from the big screen to the small screen. In the former, the excuse of packing in a little extra seems relatively valid, considering many diverse people with different tastes are experiencing it together. However, for stuff that’s meant to be streamed in the comfort of one’s home, you’d think creators would, by now, be wise to the fact that you’re always catering to a niche. Different people, different moods, different reasons for watching. The incomprehensibly vast spread of content itself caters to everyone – individual titles really don’t need to do that.


Human, created by Vipul Amrutlal Shah and Mozez Singh, suffers from the familiar problem of attempting to do too much. It just doesn’t know who it is made for, so it is injected with all kinds of overkill. At its heart, the show is ostensibly about the unholy alliance between politics and the pharmaceutical industry, which treats the lives of marginalised and deprived people as expendable. In a country like India, that isn’t even a revelation. Attempting to place this within the trappings of a medical thriller is an admirable endeavour. But the show never quite manages to shake off its problem of excess.


The show is set in Bhopal, a former princely state with a history of powerful woman rulers. Obviously, the protagonist and antagonist of the show are women. Bhopal is also known for the Union Carbide gas tragedy of 1984, where innocent people lost their lives because of corporate negligence. And so, it becomes the perfect place for this story, and for history to repeat itself. The show is content with verbally (and repeatedly) making all of these connections, instead of treating the city like a character in itself, contributing to the atmosphere of overhanging dread it was aiming for. A pity Human doesn’t borrow that from the German Netflix series Dark, instead choosing to be inspired by its background music instead.


A major pharma player is betting heavily on a new drug named S93R. Despite it being based on a formulation that’s banned in Europe, they want to introduce it in India asap. So, apart from gleefully drawing from India’s bottomless well of poor people as guinea pigs, they’re also shortcutting their way through trials and processes, doing anything to hide bad data along the way. The nexus runs wide and deep. Enter Dr Saira Sabharwal (Kulhari), who gets tangled in the mess as she joins Manthan, the expansionist medical organisation headed by Shah’s Dr Nath, hailed as a modern-day hero in town.


Really, this was all they needed to go with. But no, there’s also a separate track involving a bizarre experimental psychotherapeutic treatment for trauma. This, because Dr Nath is attempting to erase deep-rooted trauma of her own. These two separate cases of medical malpractice are connected in a convoluted manner, with only the sketchiest of details provided. Instead, you get a peculiar mother-figure (Seema Biswas) who appears to be both – boss and employee – to Dr Nath.


She’s just one of the many minor characters and storylines the show chooses to spend undue time on. Saira’s personal life unfolds briskly on the side, as we see her strained relationship with her parents, her photographer husband (returning from snapping duties in Afghanistan, no less,) her closeted sexuality, her compulsive habit of lying, her hero-worship (and more) of Dr Nath. There are characters who are bumped off with rogue lorries, those who get caught up in the mess for ‘maa ke ilaaj ke paise’, a fight for the Chief Ministership of the state, underhand deals between politicians that are obviously in the hundreds of crores, the works. Instead of a focussed train of events, choices and consequences to follow in the medical thriller mould, Human takes you on a long, meandering chase that amounts to nothing you wouldn’t expect.


To be fair, Kirti Kulhari holds up her end well, particularly when her character Saira loses her mind, or lies without batting an eyelid. Ram Kapoor features as Dr Nath’s husband, Indraneil Sengupta plays Saira’s; Mardaani 2’s Vishal Jethwa plays a misguided youngster from the city’s underbelly, Atul Kumar plays Dr Nath’s partner. They all do their bit, but none of them is particularly helped by the writing.


And that brings us to Shefali Shah. Her character is treated differently, more eerily from the others all the way through. From the heavy build-up before she appears, to the way in which she is actually framed in her first entrance scene, to that strange drone-like manner she speaks in, to even the way other characters talk about her – whether they love her or hate her; Shefali Shah as Dr Gauri Nath becomes the most prominent aspect of not just the cast of the show, but the entire existence of Human.


Her back-story, her attempt to shake off the demons of her past, her persona, her trauma – all of it is meant to drive what unfolds in the course of 10 episodes. Somehow, the writers have managed to make her both – poor as well as rich – in her formative years. Today, she injects herself with an unknown drug to numb the pain of her past. Her ultimate goal is to erase her memories of trauma completely, yet she needs to have her own agonies narrated back to her periodically by her mother-nurse. Even in a show marked by excesses, everything about Dr Gauri Nath weighs a little too heavy on the narrative.


Shefali Shah would make for a terrific supervillain. Just not this time. By virtue of her being the biggest draw for me about the show, she is inevitably its biggest let-down as well. It won’t damp my enthusiasm to watch whatever she features in next, but an actor like her needed a more worthy vehicle than the pale ordeal that is Human.


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