Web series Adulting is a show about complaining

Adulting, the five-episode web series, starring Aisha Ahmed and Yashaswini Dayama, is a Dice Media offering that caters to the millennial audience. A lot of urban twenty-somethings might be dipping their wooden spoons into tubs of gluten-free ice cream and shouting, “This is me AF,” while binge-watching the series. I’m pretty sure that’s what the writers, Ayesha Nair and Maitreyee Upadhyay, also aimed for.

The title of each episode is a synopsis in itself. While Episode One’s “Broke AF” is a satire on how Aisha’s character, Nikhat, can’t manage to throw herself a treat on her own birthday, Episode Three’s “Friends Ya Followers” follows a lame-line story about the disintegration of real life due to the tumultuousness brought on by one’s online persona.

The freedom that the digital era gives us is simple: It gives everybody a chance to hit the jackpot. A blooper can become the next big viral video, or, as in the case of Priya Prakash Varrier, a honeywink can push the teaser for a film to the ends of limitless hits on YouTube. The sensational winkvideo lasted in the eyes of the public for a week, and it gave Priya 5+ million followers.

Similarly, a “controversial tweet” by Ram Gopal Varma can make the headlines about a mass murderer in the US appear pale in comparison. These examples, I’m painting, are to give you a clear picture of the forgettable nature of online content. Of course, the memories of “Kolaveri di” and the like refuse to die down even after half a decade. But there’s really no juice in most of those videos. And, when it comes to documenting a particular period, these digital hits won’t take up more than two lines in a 10,000-word essay. We’re currently in the age of “Going Viral”.

There’s no time to make a cup of tea by looking at the setting sun behind the veils of time. We’d rather sink tea bags into hot water, and post carefully edited pictures on Instagram. And there isn’t a full stop that’s going to make a loud thud on this culture anytime soon. I sincerely believe that that’s how Adulting happened. Dice Media’s sister YouTube channel, FilterCopy, regularly posts sketches related to the trials and tribulations faced by young Indian adults. In FC, a video titled “Things Girl Roommates Do” has clocked almost 2.5 million views. It stars Aisha Ahmed and Yashaswini Dayama in their Adulting avatars (Nikhat and Ray, respectively), and gives us a glimpse into their shared-lives. The girl roommates annoy each other on a daily-basis and go as far as being one another’s guardian angles. It’s funny, and takes less than five minutes to reveal its true intention.

The FC sketch can be seen as a promotional video for the two-plus-hour web show as it was released just before the first episode of Adulting took shelter on YouTube. However, the longer version of the same affableness doesn’t hold much water. Dayama and Ahmed seem to be channeling their inner Mithila Palkar (another FilterCopy home-girl whose collaborations with the digital entertainment company have resulted in many blockbusters) throughout Adulting. All three of them play characters with similar features in web videos. This ubiquitous quality makes it hard for me to put them in various boxes.

Dayama’s Ray is a woman-child who smokes, and Ahmed’s Nikhat is a woman-child who doesn’t smoke. That’s the only major difference between the two. Oh, wait, there’s a casual inflow of Tamil words – Kanna, Amma – since Ray’s mother is a Tamilian, but nothing else is built upon this basic foundation. Until the season finale, we aren’t extended the hand of knowledge to separate the two girls. You can get confused about who’s playing whom, and you won’t be blamed for that. The season finale, titled “Now and Then,” goes back and forth from the times the girls first met at a house party to their present state of passive-aggressive replies. It’s kind of like the underlining episode where the show delightfully comes of age. Nikhat and Ray candidly throw millennial-influenced threats such as, “I’m never going to make coffee for you, Ray,” “I feel like canceling my Netflix subscription (directed to Nikhat),” etc.

And your bewildered eyes will think that this is a good enough solution for warring friends to come together. The show definitely scores brownie points for not including the cliché of discussing “boy problems” that every second YouTube video, featuring girls in the prime of their youth, touches upon. In that sense, Adulting looks inward – Ray’s unhappiness that stems from the indifference her boss shows toward her when she requests him to make her a part of an important project; Nikhat’s unshielded homesickness. That said, the scenes that have other actors on the screen are sparklier. Sheeba Chaddha (as Nikhat’s mother) breezily walks away with the best-written character of the show, and, in another episode, there’s a cab driver who eavesdrops on Ray’s incessant yawping. He’s humorous AF. These unperturbed moments carry Adulting on their shoulders. Yet, my heart turns away from jumping with joy at the sight of their busy lives and their little Mumbai apartment as the prudish mundaneness that director Jessica Sadana concocts in her series doesn’t help her proceedings take off beyond a point.