Dugdugi Review: Directed by Joydeep Mukherjee, this comedy-drama TV series (ডুগডুগি) stars Anirban Chakrabarti, Biswanath Basu, Loknath Dey, Rayati Bhattacharya and Shreya Bhattacharya, alongside others. The series has 6 episodes, each with a runtime of around 20 minutes.
Dugdugi Plot
Abanish’s humdrum life is full of boring everyday problems, both professional and personal, and he is tired of the everyday grind that doesn’t seem to add any excitement or value. However, after a slight spat when his wife goes missing, he is left fumbling to find out her whereabouts, which pushes her life into chaos.
Dugdugi Review
The odd sexual innuendos, and sometimes in-your-face sexual discussions, in Dugdugi feels so unnecessary from the first minute of the series. It’s very weird to see how interested everyone is in Abanish’s sex life for some unknown reason, and the way they discuss it is crass and over-the-top. I wonder which neighbourhood talks so freely about a neighbour’s private parts and when and how they should be sleeping with their wives. It’s so bizarre.
Anyway, the series is a hybrid between a comedy and somewhat of a thriller. Abanish is shown to be this naive man who is always down in the dumps, but you feel no remorse for him, and neither do you feel bad when his life goes up in flames thanks to his wife’s disappearance. It is weird that they try to show him as being such a weak man that everyone bullies, but he cheats on his wife and is a rather unpleasant man who is thoroughly a pervert.
Thus, we are left confused about what we should feel about our protagonist because liking him gets very difficult. Either way, he at least seems to care about his wife (or her unpaid domestic labour), and his general feather-headed behaviours make you think that he’s probably too stupid to do anything… but then again, he is cheating on his wife, so. Either way, the series afterwards focuses on Kumkum’s search and what Abanish goes through in the process.
The series starts off with somewhat amusing moments and slowly becomes more and more unpleasant and confusing. It’s like they didn’t know what to do with the runaway wife and couldn’t come up with Abanish’s lunch and dinner because men are incapable of doing basic domestic chores. The creators try to make him out to be a good guy who is just so bullied, but he is mostly vile and thoroughly uninteresting of a protagonist who is annoying at most and slappable at best.
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The story rambles on and on with this woe-is-me attitude surrounding Abanish and all women are bad and whatnot. The problem is that none of the characters are good at all, and for some reason, Abanish wife is the bad guy here. Which, fair enough, she isn’t a saint. But like… I don’t know I have no words.
The problems that he goes through are somewhat funny and mostly his own doing. The situations are also quite entertaining at first if you’re not thinking too deeply about them. The thing is, this is mostly a brainless comedy that repeats the same joke over and over again in hopes that it gets funny after the 10th time – it doesn’t, but you grow oddly accustomed to them after a while. At least the performances from a rather good star cast are solid. Sad that we have to listen to these feather-haired men ramble on and on and being thoroughly misogynistic.
Nothing really happens for most of Dugdugi‘s runtime, and Abanish’s pushover attitude gets more and more annoying, mostly because his character motivation is very confusing. Either way, the series tries to give us an odd twist that feels rather forced and unnecessary. It is outlandish and unbelievable and tries to overdo it with the insanity in the name of comedy that just leaves you scratching your head.
Dugdugi Review: Final Thoughts
I mean, I don’t know what this show is. It’s not a comedy – it’s probably a murder-thriller in the making. The final twist leaves you scratching your head, thanks to the sheer insanity that we see onscreen. It’s not funny, nor thrilling and just leaves you with an existential crisis.
Dugdugi is streaming on Hoichoi.
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