Rangeen series review: The Viineet Kumar Siingh starrer gets frisky, then wears out by the climax

A husband is adamant on becoming a gigolo because his wife hired one. Viineet Kumar Siingh’s headliner series Rangeen has an intriguing premise, but that’s about it. It’s a show that starts with promise, with an end in sight, but somewhere along the line branches out, taking unnecessary detours and going haywire. It’s a series content with swimming on the surface, avoiding any real psychological or philosophical depths in its themes or characters, happily splashing through cheap sells like sex. The show’s understanding of male ego and female desire is so basic that it gets tiring after a while. Watching the series is akin to picking up a novel with an attractive jacket, only to realise that it’s a bad one. You can abandon it, but then you will never know how it ends. Sometimes a film, a book, or a series becomes all about how it wraps up. You stop caring about the journey; it’s all about the destination. That’s not a good sign.

Creators: Amardeep Galsin and Amir Rizvi

Cast: Viineet Kumar Siingh, Rajshri Deshpande, Taaruk Raina, Sheeba Chaddha and Rajesh Sharma

Streaming on: Prime Video

Viineet plays Adarsh, a newspaper proprietor, a man of principles and integrity. While he is involved with his trailblazing journalism, his wife, Naina (Rajshri Deshpande), walks dead-eyed around the house. Their conversational topics range from food heating to shoe cleaning. It’s a dead marriage. To make matters worse, Adarsh one day finds Naina with a young gigolo, Sunny (Taaruk Raina). His ego hurt, he decides to get into the seedy world of escort service, only to prove to his wife that he is not as boring as she made him out to be. What wouldn’t men do?

Adarsh takes up the pseudonym Rangeen, and during his encounters with different women, he understands a thing or two about female wants and desires. Parallelly, Sunny, who loses his job once Adarsh gets into the picture, goes into a downward spiral. He has a strict father, and Sunny wants to escape to London, for what exactly we don’t know. He is also struggling with erectile dysfunction and is confused about his sexuality.

Rangeen has too many plot threads dangling around without any purpose. It’s scattered and directionless. Once the excitement of the premise wears off, the nine-episode run feels laborious. For a series centred on a gigolo, it seems prudish. The world seems plastic and too manicured, playing only for laughs. The intimate scenes were at most suggestive, which takes away the realism. Except for one kidnapping bid, Adarsh’s gigolo journey otherwise goes smoothly. The show tries to inject feminism at different instances, but it doesn’t seem genuine because the central female character, Naina, is abandoned by the makers. Rajshri’s acting prowess is not completely utilised in Naina’s role. She mostly mopes, hiding away her emotions, but there is not much happening with her. Sunny too starts feeling like a footnote. A lot happens with him, but nothing really sticks.

Viineet Kumar Siingh doesn’t need to flex his acting chops anymore, but he seems a bit lost with Adarsh. The maker’s idea of showing the character’s psychological turmoil is to make him smoke incessantly. Watching Vineet light up every five minutes was nauseating, and I don’t know if it made me understand Adarsh’s existential crisis, but it surely made me averse to the cigarette. Take that, statutory warnings.

There are blips of ingenuity in Rangeen, but it mostly remains ambient in nature. It scratches but never cuts deep. In the initial episodes, I expected it to go into darker spaces, trying to explore the rot of male ego and the mechanisms of the pleasure industry. Since it started with being so character-driven, I wanted Adarsh to have an epiphany and not a mere realisation. It comes in the category of content that entices the masses with its premise and gives a promise of grander themes so that the intellectual viewer tunes in too. But then it chooses to disappoint them both.