Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper, the new series on Netflix, is unmade by what could have been made of its potential. The Puneet Krishna show stems from a zinger one-line premise: a middle-class man, burdened with debts, suddenly discovers the unlikely (and lucrative) profession of being a gigolo. On the surface, it is a fun, chaotic setting that begs comparison with The Family Man, the formidable Raj & DK series that also centres on a man leading a double life. Except, that character is a spy. But in a country where ideas about female desires are wrapped in vague excess and seldom discussed, a man offering his services to satiate their wants — and in the process, decoding them — makes him a spy of a kind.

It might sound frivolous but this interplay of levity and earnestness is what adds a layer of subtext to Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper and primes it for endless possibilities. Consider everything that can emerge from a plot such as this. A timid man, prone to being ridiculed for his honesty, suddenly discovers that he excels at something where most men fail: anticipating the needs of women and fulfilling them. Turn this around and another facet opens up: the possibility to give oft-denied female desires the centrepiece in long-form, testosterone-riddled storytelling and underscore that even women have private lives. One man’s profession becomes another woman’s opportunity. But Krishna, also the showrunner of the cult streaming show Mirzapur, reduces these clutter-breaking ideas to quick, limp montages and goes nowhere near exploring them. What he does is treat them as mere openings to design a thriller about men and guns — counterparts of which have clogged every pore of the streaming landscape in India.

Written by Sumit Purohit, Aarti Raval and Karan Vyas, Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper fails at a fundamental level. They design the central protagonist (Manav Kaul) as someone who is an upright government employee and resorts to being an escort of sorts when the bank, which had all his life savings, is freezed overnight. But his journey from a diffident man, unsure in the company of women, to meeting them behind closed doors and performing intimacy culminates in a span of two episodes and feels short changed to say the least. Nothing adds up.

Tribhuvan Mishra lives with his wife and kids at Noida and works at Noida Planning Board. He is a middle-class man; a faithful husband and devout son (he has “Mummy Papa” inked on his hand). His wife Ashoklata (Naina Sareen wasted in a woeful one-note role), a proficient baker, adores him. And although her brother and his wife (Sumit Gulati and Shweta Basu Prasad) judge him as a loser, Ashoklata’s regard for her husband is undented. For all intent and purposes, Tribhuvan appears to be the kind of a man who would associate love with marriage and sex with transgression. There ought to be conservativeness in his approach precisely for the social milieu he belongs to, and on the off chance that there isn’t (as is the case) the show must underline the reason. It does not.

Nothing in the writing of Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper suggests — and convinces — why someone like Tribhuvan, a chartered accountant topper, would be selling sex once his savings become inaccessible and loans pile up. The only evidence is his wife appreciating him but anyone half-familiar with gender would know that women are subliminally conditioned to prop up the ego of the man in bed. However, even when Tribhuvan takes the call, it remains a mystery that he undergoes zero ethical or moral conflict. It does not strike him, even once, that he might be cheating on his wife. His side hustle opens up another line of query — how this might transpire in his own bedroom with Ashoklata and affect their sex life. The show hints at it once and never circles back again.

The implausibility of this ambivalence is replicated again whenTribhuvan Mishra transitions from a sincere employee to a dishonest man after getting embroiled in a murder. On paper, the writerly aspiration backing this is evident. The duality imbued in his character feels like a cross between coming of age and coming of rage. In other words, Tribhuvan Mishra is designed with the clay of both Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008; like Surinder Sahni, he drives a yellow scooter) and Baazigar (1993; like Ajay Sharma, Mishra’s personality alters as an act of revenge). But the show refuses to commit to these and instead merely keeps grasping at them.

The same is true for all the characters, and there are plenty. Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper teases the dual lives of most of them, hinting that everyone lives (or at least has the ability to) with secrets. For instance, there is a local confectioner, Raja Bhaiya (Shubhrajyoti Barat) who doubles up as a goon; there is his wife Bindi (Tillotama Shome), a Hindi film-addict who only wants her austere husband to break loose and dance for her. Seeing no chances of that happening, she seeks out the services of Tribhuvan, who goes under the alias CA Topper. There is a set of henchmen — Dhaincha (Ashok Pathak) and Lappu (Amarjeet Singh) — who have their own past. Then there are builders who sit with a gun on the table, a local paan shop owner who arranges for a firearm, and a traditional housewife who is prepared to pull the trigger at a critical moment.

There is little logic here and one can argue this is deliberate. The directors, Amrit Raj Gupta (he directed the first season of Gullak) and Krishna, pack in a lot in aid of a surrealist sort of worldbuilding that is constantly infiltrated by Hindi films (the title track of Baazigar keeps floating; constant debate over whether Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan is the better actor is revealed to be a love language; a lodge whose name, lit up, is “Urmila”) and wrapped in excess. Every scene is shot in the hues of stark, primary colours (like it’s a dream; one must also mention that the sex scenes are shot with upsetting traditional lens) and the lack of subtlety (the hotel where Tribhuvan meets most of his clients is called Madhur Milaap) is strident. But the tedious plot with multiple characters obstruct any of this to land or even take a flight. Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper is too cagey to be Raj and DK’s Guns & Gulaabs, too conventional to be Abhishek Chaubey’s Killer Soup, and too underwritten to stand on its own feet.

It does not help that the tone is somewhere between a satire and a drama that pledges to be neither. On their part, the makers throw everything to the wall — a queer subplot, a revenge drama, a gang war, a love story among two elderly people, a couple willing to try a threesome, a cake recipe that travels far and wife, a police officer wanting to prove himself after being taunted by his estranged wife — but not a single element sticks.

With every episode (there are nine, each is an hour long), Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper threatens to become a different show and so do the characters. A docile wife turns hostile with little provocation, a suspicious mother-in-law drops in from nowhere and a fellow male escort (Jitin Gulati screaming to be given a better role) gets entangled in a mess that has nothing to do with him. Scenes go one forever and still convey nothing. Sometimes, in the midst of mayhem, a stray commentary on gender flashes (like a woman retaliating after a cop mistakes her for an escort and shames her, or another woman being alert to the whistle of a pressure cooker in between a gun fight) as if the makers suddenly remember what they had started out with. But these flourishes are offset by the show’s grave oversight of depicting one agential female character.

Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper is undoubtedly a missed opportunity and a colossal wastage of the talents involved. All three writers have proved their mettle before (Purohit and Vyas were writers on Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story; Raval is behind ‘Interview’, a wonderful short from Netflix’s anthology Feels Like Ishq). Krishna is a co-creator of Mirzapur and his recent outing is stacked with immensely watchable actors. That none of them makes a mark says more about the show as a whole than their loose parts in particular. Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper would have been easier to dismiss had it not been the promise it withheld. Watching the series is like witnessing a topper settling for less. The potential causes the undoing.

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