Kay Kay Menon and Ranvir Shorey are in fine form in the series which, although endearing and fun in its own way, lacks the ambition and caustic edge of the other popular versions
Any new iteration of the Sherlock Holmes canon carries a risk of comparison but the creators of Shekhar Home treat their prospect at hand with a good amount of nonchalance. The latest Indian version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's widely celebrated fictional character is created by Aniruddha Guha and Srijit Mukherji whose glint-in-the-eye approach to the task is equal parts endearing and underwhelming.
On the one hand, Shekhar Home is a neat throwback to the early days of television in India when simple yet novel shows like Karamchand (1985), Byomkesh Bakshi (1993) and Tehkikaat (1994) ushered in the desi detective sensibility. On the other, the seeming lack of ambition among the makers ends up being a tad grating on the nerves of the viewers who have grown to love and appreciate a much more sophisticated form of storytelling on the small screen.
A conflict oh-so bland
But the very simplistic nature of Shekhar Home occasionally works its charm and somehow manages to keep us glued till the very end. The story takes place in a tech-deficient era of the 1990s and the fictional town of Lonpur in West Bengal becomes the main site of intrigue. Srijit Mukherji, who directs four of six episodes (with Rohan Sippy directing the final two), and his team of writers imagine an idyllic and purposely unrealistic setting in which characters are designed to fulfill various archetypes like in a sitcom.
If Shekhar Home’s (played by Kay Kay Menon) landlady Mrs Henry (Shernaz Patel) feels like the strong maternal presence in the genius detective’s life, the town’s main cop Gobinda Laha must remain playing the part of the stooge who is honest yet comical. Jayavrat Saini, the Dr. Watson counterpart played by Ranvir Shorey, must be the other smart guy in the room but not smart enough to crack the mystery on his own — one of his chief jobs is to ask the obvious questions to his partner/boss Home.
And the villain themselves must have a goal that feels rather too vague and nondescript but their villainy must never feel too daunting or heavy, even when it concerns an international arms deal and the potential obliteration of a city. The baddie here is fleetingly referred to as ‘M’ (as in Moriarty?) who jumps out of the shadows a bit abruptly in the latter half of the show. While Andrew Scott’s Jim Moriarty came as a strong intellectual match to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes, the conflict between Home and M here feels unbearably, dismissively bland.
A rapturous rapport
That is to say that Shekhar Home takes something like the BBC blockbuster Sherlock and jettisons the psychological depth of the show right at the beginning. Everything here, in Lonpur and other scattered parts of West Bengal, including Kolkata, feels a little too vanilla because the intent is to satiate our desires and not to combat them. Fittingly, the show begins to show signs of any gumption only in the fourth episode when the central character's backstory slowly comes to the fore. The preceding episodes — all loosely based on Doyle’s works available in the public domain — are interestingly focused on dispensing mild thrills as Home and Saini solve crimes that seem on a par with Feluda or Akbar-Birbal level of complexity.
Kay Kay Menon’s performance, too, is pitched to that meter. His character’s ability to forensically dissect a situation or a person and his skill to remain watchful and patient till the last straw is drawn is often underscored by a wry smile or a short crackle. While Menon seems completely at ease in essaying the role, one gathers that he also craves a challenge as a performer that the writing almost never offers him. As a result, we mostly get to see him sauntering from one case to another without ever having to break a sweat or being confronted by antagonism of any merit, leaving his bright-hued baatik kurtas and shirts to make up for all the vibrancy in his life. Even when the narrative backtracks and reveals a different side to his being (explaining how and why he came to be Shekhar Home), the stakes don’t go up because the material remains devoid of the spirit or the caustic zeal we expect from the world of Sherlock Holmes.
And yet, the lead pair of Menon and Shorey, along with the extended cast, including Rasika Duggal, Kirti Kulhari, Kaushik Sen and others, somehow make Shekhar Home tick. This is a show that is unapologetically Bengali in its flavouring and what really helps the cast in its cause is the region’s trademark air of leisure. Everything unfolds at its own languid pace and the bonny nostalgia-inducing personality accentuates the carefully designed mood. Yes, Shekhar Home does not boast the skill or the potency of the stuff that crime aficionados prefer — nor does it appease the sleuths that we all are today — but it works nevertheless because of a kind of simplicity that once occurred not just in Indian TV but also in the real lives outside. Beyond all that, the show works because Menon and Shorey strike a solid rapport that is on full display in the finale episode.
Shekhar Home is currently streaming on Jio Cinema
