In a scene from the second season of ZEE5’s Never Kiss Your Best Friend (NKYBF), Tanie tells her uncle Bittu “Iss zamane mein khoon se chithiyan nahi likhte”, in a casual yet restrained moment of profound revelation. How love has changed in our films, in our stories. Bittu, played by the ever-so-charming Jaaved Jaaferi happily accepts this feedback but it is telling that a woke rom-com can so easily drop truth bombs about the way Indian audiences have evolved alongside the stories they consume.Never Kiss Your Best Friend Season 1-2 Download
In its first season, NKYBF was a breezy, happily messy rom-com that though flawed and elitist in certain areas (set in London being one), aptly served as an escape route from the grit and grime of OTT’s darkest places. In the second season, there are more first-world problems to be solved, but this time the show does what it was always supposed to do – get lost in the unpredictability of relationships.In the second season, Tanie, played by the cheerful Anya Singh is deep into her career as a screenwriter at something called Meraki Studio. The show evidently embraces the notion of working with words for a living with more gusto than anything set in India ever could. People run around talking about characters, scripts and arcs – a world mostly restricted to the city of Mumbai.
But to make this world accessible, the show is also populated with peppy extroverts and what is probably the most good-looking line-up of writers, editors and filmmakers assembled anywhere in the world.Tanie’s ambition clashes with Sumer, the delightfully light-handed Nakuul Mehta, after the two are forced to share an office and a project. It’s a sensitive and perhaps educated portrayal of love cutting across the lines of work and ambition.