Dugdugi (2023) S01

Abanish lives a humdrum Dugdugi life with complicated personal equations and banal professional problems. His ordinary life takes an extraordinary turn when his wife suddenly goes missing, resulting in utter chaos that doesn’t seem to end.

Directed by Joydeep Mukherjee, this comedy-drama TV series (ডুগডুগি) stars Anirban Chakrabarti, Biswanath Basu, Loknath Dey, Rayati Bhattacharya and Shreya Bhattacharya, alongside others. The series has 6 episodes, each with a runtime of around 20 minutes. Abanish’s humdrum life is full of boring everyday problems, both professional and personal, and he is tired of the everyday grind that doesn’t seem to add any excitement or value. However, after a slight spat when his wife goes missing, he is left fumbling to find out her whereabouts, which pushes her life into chaos. Anyway, the series is a hybrid between a comedy and somewhat of a thriller. Abanish is shown to be this naive man who is always down in the dumps, but you feel no remorse for Dugdugi him, and neither do you feel bad when his life goes up in flames thanks to his wife’s disappearance. It is weird that they try to show him as being such a weak man that everyone bullies, but he cheats on his wife and is a rather unpleasant man who is thoroughly a pervert. Thus, we are left confused about what we should feel about our protagonist because liking him gets very difficult. Either way, he at least seems to care about his wife (or her unpaid domestic labour), and his general feather-headed behaviours make you think that he’s probably too stupid to do anything… but then again, he is cheating on his wife, so. Either way, the series afterwards focuses on Kumkum’s search and what Abanish goes through in the process. The series starts off with somewhat amusing moments and slowly becomes more and more unpleasant and confusing. It’s like they didn’t know what to do with the runaway wife and couldn’t come up with Abanish’s lunch and dinner because men are incapable of doing basic domestic chores. The creators try to make him out to be a good guy who is just so bullied, but he is mostly vile and thoroughly uninteresting of a protagonist who is annoying at most and slappable at best.