Decoupled, on Netflix isn’t so much a comedy about a couple on the verge of divorce as it is a vessel to communicate creator Manu Joseph’s most divisive thoughts to an audience that normally wouldn’t care about them.With its off-putting bro-code bravado and casual mean-spiritedness, Decoupled has missed the boat by at least 10 years. Had it been released in the era of Entourage or Californication—with which it shares a self-involved writer protagonist—it could’ve been excused. But as it stands, it comes off as positively prehistoric, giving Joseph an outlet to express his disdain for therapists, the ‘NDTV types’, and the #MeToo movement — all by using his characters as a mouthpiece.Decoupled Season 1 Download
But who knew Madhavan would be so brilliant at playing such an insufferable man. His pulp fiction novelist Arya is the sort of person you wouldn’t want to sit next to at a restaurant—not because he’d complain bitterly about the food, but because he’d probably pull you aside and give you an unsolicited lecture about why most restaurant kitchens employ only men.There is an element of victimhood in the show’s writing that Madhavan’s performance completely ignores. He plays Arya like the man of privilege that he is, someone who revels in his made-up position in society—the sort of guy whose mom probably told him he was special growing up. But the writing limits Arya to rants about pointless stuff; he never complains about things that actually matter. Arya lives in a bubble of his own making, which separates him not just from the real world, but also his family.Decoupled comes dangerously close to sympathising with the sort of people that it wants to satirise. For instance, if you didn’t know that Joseph also wrote Serious Men, you might miss the satire in Decoupled completely. Especially when it takes repeated digs at Parasite, an odd film to mock, you’d agree—was Coolie No 1 off the table? But like so much of Decoupled, this feels like a personal vendetta.You might think that it is a two-hander about modern relatioships, but it really isn’t. More than anything else, it feels like watching the neighbourhood troublemaker yell from the rooftops only to be met with complete silence from people who have actual jobs to do.