Popular YouTube channel Dice Media uploaded the first episode of their weekly web series What The Folks on Thursday. Directed by first-timer Ruchir Arun, the show stars the channels regular Veer Rajwant Singh (Nikhil) as a newly married start-up employee trying to bond with his in-laws, played by Vipin Sharma and Deepika Amin.
The web series is in line with their previous show Little Things, which focused on the everyday life of a millennial couple play by web star Mithila Palkar and Dhruv Sehgal. The maximum struggle that either of them had in their comfortable lives was who got to use the bathroom first or what to watch on Netflix before sleeping. Yet it was watchable because the episodes went by quickly, there was no forced humour and there was a semblance of truth to the portrayals.
What The Folks handles comparatively more weightier subjects, of young people getting tired of the hyper-religiosity of their parents, their casual racism and the need to get on with their lives without having to do the things that really matter in secret, such as smoking a joint in private. Young people eat Greek yoghurt and watch Kanti Shah’s cult film Gunda 14 times, but that’s all that there is to them. Middle-aged men and women get much of their information from WhatsApp and make the occasional sex joke but are largely good-natured.
Like most Indian web series, the situations and characters are a little too banal. There is only the merest whiff of complexity. At 24 minutes, it promises never to be a tough watch, easily consumed and quickly forgotten.
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