Mismatched Season 2 review: Rohit Saraf and Prajakta Koli’s Netflix rom-com series continues to be a wasted opportunity

Language: English/Hindi

Cast: Prajakta Koli, Rohit Saraf, Taaruk Raina, Rannvijay Singha, Vidya Malvade, Vihaan Samat, Muskkaan Jafferi

Star rating: 2/5

The second season of Mismatched — the Netflix young adult romance series adapted from Sandhya Menon’s book When Dimple Met Rishi — doesn’t feel like a show as much as it feels like a statement. By which I mean that characters in the show aren’t allowed to exist unless they prove a point — mental health is important, body image issues are real, queer romance needs its spotlight, social media is a lie, NRI fuckboys fall in love too, losing your virginity isn’t a big deal, everyone deserves a second chance at love and so on and so forth.

The proceedings are so synthetic that the storytelling ends up coming last, which means that the new season unfolds without any semblance of depth or character development that isn’t pure melodrama. It’s a strange dichotomy — a season that seems to underline seemingly progressive ideas being limited by its makers’ conservative understanding of storytelling. If a show is to be assessed on how compellingly it translates its ideas from the page to the screen, then Mismatched S2 continues to remain a wasted opportunity. It is forgettable, badly acted, lacking in any chemistry, and staged so awkwardly that feels endlessly frustrating.

The new season, unfolding over eight episodes, picks up on the first season’s cliffhanger ending that suggested an impending love triangle. Things have soured between Dimple (Prajakta Koli), the nerdy damsel-in-distress and Rishi (Rohit Saraf), the naive believer of one true love, their fractured relationship is capped off by the fact that Dimple ended up kissing her classmate Harsh (Vihaan Samat) in a moment of weakness. It gives the writers (the new season is written by Gazal Dhaliwal, Aarsh Vora, Akshay Jhunjhunwala, and Nandini Gupta) an excuse to keep stretching the “Will they? Won’t they?” rom-com template to exhaustion to sustain tension or evoke any chemistry. It manages neither of those things. The problem is that the proceedings are so unimaginatively designed that it belies the mystery that comes with wondering whether two characters will actually end up together — or even wanting it. In here, Dimple and Harsh’s friendship turns into a good-natured situationship before Harsh actually falls in love with her. Then, just when it is convenient for the show, Dimple and Rishi get back together only to fight and then make up. Plot developments turn into contrivances when they exist without any purpose and nothing about this central love-triangle

The show’s aversion to risky storytelling is visible in how it treats its characters, which is to say that the writers are too much in love with their characters to do justice to any of them. Much of it stems from the show’s hesitance to examine the darker, selfish impulses of its characters without sugarcoating it. In here, every character is rewarded with a redeeming arc irrespective of what transgressions they commit. So a skinny Instagram influencer turns from bully to victim in a matter of minutes the same way a best friend’s betrayal is underlined with a saccharine backstory about survival.

In the universe of Mismatched, forgiveness and romantic interest are always around the corner (there are at least three instances this season when a character just happens to find someone interested in them). But in over-explaining the motives of its character at any given opportunity, Mismatched neglects to actually develop its characters. Take for instance, the storytelling device that the new season subscribes to, in which each episode is held together by the voiceover of a character from the show. So most of the season actually revolves around characters telling us everything on their mind (“I just wanna scroll mindlessly till I numb the pain in my heart”) without the writers taking any effort to narratively articulate the odds that are at stake. The dialogue, in particular, is so pedestrian and pretentious, that it works against its own characters.

Nowhere are the dangers of older people talking on behalf of a young population more evident than in the show’s second season. Saying that none of the makers, including director Akarsh Khurrana, actually understand young adults would be a polite understatement simply because of how dedicated the show remains in turning all of them into caricatures. The tone and thematic preoccupations of the second season tries to force down a Sex Educaton meets Euphoria aesthetic without really committing to taking any leaps whatsoever. For instance, the skinny influence paralysed by body image issues gets cheated on by her horny boyfriend who looks elsewhere for sex. Except, the sub-plot unfolds so conservatively that it instantly villainizes her boyfriend without probing the connection between masculinity and losing your virginity or even, appearing interested in making us understand how young people actually view love and sex.

That the show doesn’t quite possess the wit or intelligence to fully depict the complexity of the romantic or sex lives of young adults is the most evident in its superficial imagining of a queer romance. The second season casts Priya Banerjee — arguably the show’s worst casting decision —as Ayesha Duggirala, an attractive, openly queer woman who embarks on a romance with Namrata, the reserved girl on campus wo was outed in the last season. Banerjee’s Ayesha is a startup founder who’s on campus to mentor the students on the apps they’re building. As is standard with the second season, not one minute is spent on showing us her professional genius; instead the show just tells us that she is one and expects us to buy it.

Even if you ignore the potential case of grooming that such an unequal power dynamic could manifest in this romantic coupling, it’s frankly impossible to neglect how the makers turn Banerjee’s character into a trope. Her sermons (there’s even a music video) on same-sex love, homophobia, and agency feel so obviously written that her existence in the show ends up resembling a disclaimer. If it isn’t bad enough that the show strips her off any individuality (his is a show where people are either nerdy or they are attractive — Ayesha is naturally both these things) under the guise of writing a “plucky woman,” the second season of Mismatched is also telling of how frequently female ambition exists offscreen. Not only does the show then, fail to build on a middling but promising first season but more crucially, Mismatched fails to do any justice to its own universe (case in point: it’s impossible that two queer woman could openly kiss at a Jaipur fort in front of Rajasthani folk dancers and remain unscathed).

In that, the second season isn’t just limited by directional inefficiency and shoddy execution but it also often appears to have no story. It’s hard to remain invested in Dimple and Rishi’s love story, anyway stacked with contrivances (the writers go as far as to suggest that the two are star-crossed lovers) when Saraf and Koli boast no chemistry at all. One of the standout things of the first season was just how easy it was to fall in love with both actors falling in love with each other. There’s no such fortune in the second season: Saraf and Koli spend much of the season with sullen faces, appearing to have lost grasp on their own characters. Their performances aren’t just inconsistent, they appear strained. Saraf in particular, looks simply disinterested in his character.

In comparison, Samat and Koli manage to conjure a believable chemistry that keeps things going for a while, although the effect is diluted by Samat’s acute expression-less emoting. It’s surprising just how over-the-top the acting is this season: Muskkan Jafferi’s turn as Celina is simply unbearable; even Kritika Bhardwaj’s spunky screen presence can’t rescue the show’s simplistic understanding of the internet or Gen-Z influencers. The only character that stood out to me this season was someone I had written off in the first season: Taaruk Raina turns in a thoughtful turn as the handicapped Anmol that is both showy and quiet and it’s nice to see one character in the show have an arc that makes any sense.

In the end, though, the second season of Mismatched felt illuminating to me in ways I didn’t expect it to — for instance, it’s proof of just how mediocre Indian creators can be, even with every resource at their disposal. Over eight episodes, Mismatched remains dedicated to force an aesthetic rather than a believable story. It doesn’t matter if the formats of storytelling change or the mediums of transmission, Indian storytellers are visibly trapped in their own conditioning. You’d think writing an easy-breezy romance campus drama would have been easier without subscribing to the unrealistic expectations that Bollywood has forced on the genre. But then you find a show like Mismatched that will still paint the rom-com genre with a reductive lens, championing outdated ideas while providing the illusion of subverting them. I can only hope that the show’s third season isn’t just greenlit on the assumption of the potential the show could have and actually demand that from its makers.

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on Twitter.

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