Save The Tigers Web Series: A campy, tried-and-tested comedy with patchy writing

For all the serious issues Save The Tigers wishes to talk about, be it the emptiness of activism, class conflict or the inability of men to voice out their frustrations against women in a marriage, the series is filled with lightness, from its brightly lit visuals to Ajay Arasada's peppy, urban background score to its runtime, packaged in six bite-sized episodes. The series wants you to ponder about our society and the hypocrisy of individuals, but with lots of comedy, almost making its resultant story treatment akin to making a child swallow bitter medicine with a spoonful of sugar. Similarly, there is a sharp, instantaneous sense of ingestion to it all in Save The Tigers, without a feeling of its components making their flavours or craftsmanship felt at any given point in time. 

Cast: Priyadarshi, Abhinav Gomatam, Chaitanya Krishna 

Creator: Mahi V Raghav, Pradeep Advaitham

Director: Teja Kakumanu

Save The Tigers is the story of three men from nearly but not entirely different walks of life. We have Rahul (Abhinav Gomatam), a techie-turned-laidback writer, Ganta Ravi (Priyadarshi), a dairy business owner who got married off by his father at 19 and Vikram (Krishna Chaitanya), a jaded copywriter who has almost but given up on his job and marriage. The three men meet for the first time at the Mothers' Day celebration in their kids' school when each of them turns up in place of their respective, headstrong wives. The wives of these men display a spectrum of purportedly annoying female behaviour - one is insistent on uprooting a family around in favour of status and class, the other chooses work over being a good mother and a good wife and the third is suspected of having an affair. The men in contrast to these women are seen as inoffensive, largely chilled-out individuals with good intentions and natures. All three men are fathers to daughters and are seen actively parenting their children, sometimes even more than their mothers. In addition to a wife and a daughter, the three men develop a platonic bond outside their family. While it is a domestic help for Rahul and a distressed co-worker for Vikram, Ravi is seen sharing a tender relationship with the cows he raises in his farm. 

While the similarities between these men stack up neatly, their individual differences also add crucial detailing to their character arcs. One is unemployed, the other is in a loveless marriage and the third belongs to a salt-of-the-earth Telangana family, in direct contrast to his Tenglish speaking buddies. 

Credit where it is due, Save The Tigers is neatly grounded in social backdrops that feel authentic, even when the actors are pantomiming, as they usually do in cinema. From the apartment societies to the "international" schools to broadcasts of Karthika Deepam and Bathuku Jataka Bandi-style TV shows, you do not doubt the world Save The Tigers is set in, most probably because that is also the world most of us live in. 

The conflicts prevalent in marriages and the more peaceful moments between the couples are effectively displayed. The show's undoing, however, is its incomplete, sometimes overly convenient writing. Just when you begin to think there is too much coincidence in how all the wives meet, the show throws in more coincidences with the next scene, where they all find out the truth about their husbands at the same time. Do these wives meet another time? Do they lean on each other for support the way the men of these series do? The series is content with letting these women exist for the sole purpose of moving the story of their husbands forward. With the entire story set up with some deft and confidence, it is certainly disappointing to not receive a satisfying pay-off or closure. The series short-sells gags to its audience when it should have actually focused on its strong suit of interpersonal dynamics. Abhinav Gomatam and Priyadarshi handle the comic portions ably but the story itself loses steam halfway, with no amount of acting being able to bring it back to momentum. For a story sold as a series meant for binge-watching, it ambles by with comedy more on par with a sitcom, the kind that releases a single episode weekly. If only the makers made a decision between choosing to merely play to the gallery or crafting a character-driven dramedy. The show ends with a cliffhanger that makes such little sense to its episode-to-episode proceedings, its sheer randomness is an insult to the time its viewer has spent watching each episode. Save The Tigers was supposed to be quick and light, but one ends up feeling weary and heavy, wishing the writers wrote a lot more into this reliable premise and its decent set of characters.