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Published : 22 Sep 2025, 10:43 AM
When Ananya Panday debuted in “Student of the Year 2” and the nepotism debate in Bollywood hit fever pitch, I remember reading that Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan wanted to direct rather than act.
Despite my lifelong loyalty to SRK and my soft spot for his son, I rolled my eyes: “Of course, you’d be a director – how else to prove you’re a different little snowflake?”
Now, anyone who knows me knows I am the biggest cheerleader for nepotism in Bollywood — after Karan Johar, naturally. I am a vocal advocate of star kids’ rights, and an equally vocal defender of their wrongs. Even then, I was sceptical about Aryan’s first directorial venture, “The Ba***ds of Bollywood”.
This is, in fact, the first show where I sat through the credits just to check whether Aryan had really done the work. To my surprise, he didn’t just direct it, he also co-wrote the screenplay and dialogue.
The show opens with film-crew audio filled with swear words, which I braced for as forced edginess. But the cursing felt authentic, the kind you throw at friends for fun.
That banter carried throughout the whole show, laced with unpolished jokes, sometimes explicit without ever becoming crude.
The plot itself is straightforward: a Delhi boy, Aasmaan, dreams of stardom and navigates Bollywood with the help of family and friends, clearly an echo of SRK’s own origin story.
But what carries this cliched, overdone premise, makes it different from counterparts like “Om Shanti Om” and “Luck By Chance” is the easter eggs, the nonchalant humour, and its ability to actually resonate with the younger audience who see through a try-hard attempt at being relatable.
Unlike most youth-oriented series, this one doesn’t pander with desperate Gen-Z slang or politically correct “woke” quips.
Instead, it goes for sharp cultural humour, self-deprecation, and even digs at the director’s brushes with the police and drugs, ending one episode with the line “Say no to drugs,” cheekily followed by Aryan’s own name in the credits.
The show is layered with inside jokes and Bollywood Easter eggs, like the jabs at “nepo-kids” not being able to speak Hindi, or the banter between Ranveer Singh and Karan Johar which is a Reddit-fuelled fan fiction finally brought to life.
The cameos are deliciously meta, and I’m not talking about the three Khans making their web-series debut together.
It’s the little details, like introducing Emraan Hashmi as a backup intimacy coach for Dharma Productions. But Aryan takes it one step further, making Aasmaan’s best friend Parvaiz burst into song as he lays eyes on Emraan.
It truly mirrors the way every 20-something man I know worships 90s Emraan, especially the songs. I can personally vouch that if my boyfriend and his group of friends could ever come across Emraan Hashmi, they would pull the exact same move, serenade him with the same song, Arabic verses included.
Mafia boss Ghafoor’s interest in Bollywood alludes to Sanjay Dutt’s interactions with the Mumbai mafia. And right when you’re expecting Sanju Baba to walk into the screen, Ghafoor is revealed to be Arshad Warsi instead, Sanjay’s iconic sidekick from the Munna Bhai franchise.
Casting pulls its own weight. Rajat Bedi resurfaces as “Jaraj Saxena,” a riff on his villain days as “Koi… Mil Gaya’s” Raj Saxena. It took me three whole episodes to recognise him, which felt like the show was trolling me with its own “he looks familiar” gag.
Even the CGI-heavy chase scene worked, veering into “Need for Speed” territory thanks to Anirudh Ravichander’s background score.
Still, it isn’t flawless. Early episodes drag with predictable, sometimes impractical plotlines. The sets often look too staged. For much of the run, it feels like the comic timing and banter are doing the heavy lifting.
I found myself questioning the central premise, surely no father in 2025 is this possessive? Then, just when I was about to write it off, what had seemed like clichés revealed themselves as deliberate misdirections. Suddenly, the show wasn’t just parodying Bollywood, it was pulling off a magic trick, lifted from the most famous TV shows of our time.
By the end, “The Bads of Bollywood” feels like both a celebration and a satire of the industry, a nepotism project that knows it’s a nepotism project and dares you not to enjoy it anyway.
Aryan Khan may not silence every critic, but with this debut, he’s shown he’s not just here to live in his father’s shadow, he’s here to play with it.
