The Great Indian Kapil Show Episode 2 Review: Some Gossips – There Is Nothing Special About Rohit Sharma-Shreyas Iyer Appearances (Image: YouTube.com/NetflixIndia)If Kapil Sharma’s shows are about Indian entertainment culture and things that are mostly marketed and sold in the country, the guests have so far been from Bollywood, sports mostly cricket and music industries. One major business in India that gets more spotlight than any other industries, politics and politicians, has majorly been avoided by the show runners, exceptions being actor or musician-politicians like Navjot Singh Sidhu (as crew member), Ravi Kishan, Manoj Tiwari, Raj Babbar, Kangana Ranaut, Govinda, Kumar Sanu and Kamal Haasan. This time as well, in his latest OTT avatar in The Great Indian Kapil Show (TGIKS), the comedian repeats cricketers, with Rohit Sharma and Shreyas Iyer. Simply, the second episode of TGIKS is old Kapil Sharma-wine in Netflix’ packaging. Nothing more than that.
There were better Kapil Sharma shows with sportspersons than this, especially the ones with Wasim Akram, Brett Lee, Chris Gayle, Harbhajan Singh and Sunil Gavaskar. The latest one with Indian captain Rohit Sharma and star India batter Shreyas Iyer being streamed is a real damp squib. The conversation with the cricketers is not offering nothing new except some cheap gossips Rohit Shares about his teammates and calling them names like ‘lazy roosters’ and ‘messy’. And also, some weird justifications about the captain using most number of curse words behind the stumps and in the dressing room. In fact, most of these things are familiar to an average Indian cricket fan.
One heartening scene in the whole episode is in which Rohit Sharma talking about the loss of Indian national team in the final of ICC World Cup. He is seen not only acknowledging the effort his team put in in the penultimate game of the tournament, but also applauds the Australian team for their great effort to snatch the game away from the hosts after losing three wickets early in the match that was being watched by millions.
Kapil Sharma, ‘who has got a platform now that is being streamed in more than 190 countries’ (his words, not mine), needs to up his game. In this episode, he makes comedy looks more of gossiping and cheap commentary about players (or he has the guts to stream things like that in the name of comedy).
One upgrade he made as he moved to Netflix was getting Sunil Grover back to the show. But, Guthi-turned-Dafli from the previous episode is being wasted in the second episode as engineer Chumpak Mittal who starts with a rhythm and then falters to lowest pit when trying to throw some sleazy jokes. His much-acclaimed Kapil Dev doppelganger could not also help Mr Grover in the show – wasted again.
Krushna Abhishek as a ground staff and Kiku Sharda as Chef Dhaniyalal do not make much difference in this episode.
Overall, if Kapil Sharma is joining Netflix means something special for him, the audience would not vouch that, in reality, he is still stuck with the same old meaningless TV skits.