Now, this is the miniseries I wanted to watch. Instead,
they aired some thing starring Chris Kattan...
So, Bollywood Hero. Here's the thing: it would be a perfectly fun watch if Chris Kattan was meticulously excised from every single frame. A comedic miniseries about a bunch of easy-on-the-eyes Bollywood entertainment types in Mumbai? With dance numbers? Sold! But... that's not actually Bollywood Hero, now airing on IFC.
Even though you'd prefer to spend time with all the other members of the cast, Bollywood Hero is a mocku-dramedy about a bumbling, talent-deprived Caucasian guy (Chris Kattan the person and character both) who has a fish-out-of-water adventure trying to land a film role in India, a foreign place that has a minimum hourly quota of scene transitions featuring shots of crowds and street people. As Kattan-the-person describes it, India's got that whole "third world country" thing that teaches you the value of survival and life and stuff like democratic Constitutions (what does India, the world's largest democracy, even know about that), and indeed his character will learn so much, so much about life and stuff as he fumbles toward self-discovery and romance with a strong-minded Indian woman with goals and dreams of her own (in particular, a script-mandated soft spot for unappealing white D-list actors).
Oh, Chris Kattan. He has some musical numbers here that make you wish he didn't, because even though it's a key plot point that he-playing-himself can't dance that well, he... acts as well as he dances, and he doesn't dance that well. Also, he seems shorter than actress Neha Dhupia (could be the shoes), his partner in one key dance number, which wouldn't be a problem except that if you have a good-looking lady and her backup crew elegantly dancing away and then some muggsy dwarf jumps in to gyrate awkwardly and flail at her collarbone, it doesn't work even if you cut to a bunch of Indian people clapping their admiration for the brave, brave white guy doing a mediocre job.
Another number has Kattan "dancing" with a bunch of Mumbai-dwelling impoverished types, "singing" a song about being... untouchable. See, Kattan is very sad that he was kicked out of a swanky hotel and nobody wants him in a corny movie about the caste system 'cause he can't dance and his credit card was frozen. Now, the number could work if the show's humor was knowingly based on being ridiculously inappropriate--It's Always Sunny in Mumbai--but this series wants that schmaltz, that aww, that redemption, wants to convince you there is a genuine, beating heart at its center, so the "Untouchable" scene just comes off as a tone-deaf miscue.
“Somebody at ‘SNL,’ a very successful writer, once said to me, ‘Kattan, stick to characters that don’t talk.’ That hurt. And I think other people thought the same thing. So letting myself try something like this was important.”
Of course, something like that would hurt. Hurt a lot. But hey, sometimes life just fits you for a niche, through no fault of your own. And not talking, acting-acting, or Bollywood dancing, that's a good, solid, Chris Kattan niche. In the over-long mobile phone ad at the end of a Bollywood Hero installment, Kattan makes the constant repetition of his own name so unfunny it's like he's training the audience for some kind of Pavlovian gag reflex, so... he's got a potential comedy void thing going for him, too. Poor guy.
Mind you, even if Bollywood Hero replaced Kattan with someone better suited for the role, it would still have problems like the is-it-supposed-to-be-funny-or-just-dubious "Untouchable" number and its bog-standard approach to the whole White Person Goes To "Strange" Foreign Country That Is Mainly A Backdrop For Experiences (That May Or May Not Include A Cast Of Ethnic Foils) On White Person's Way To Finding... Themself! plot. But it'd still be more tolerable. Nowhere near as good as a straight-up mocku-dramedy about ambitious siblings and stars in the Bollywood scene, of course, but that's showbiz for you.
