Adults, created by Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, is a strange beast to grapple with, and even harder to tame. It is funny, sassy, risqué (sometimes to an embarrassing degree) and true to its 20-something aspirations.
But it also seems like much sound and fury signifying callowness. As our character-actor David Abraham Cheulker said in one of his films, “The problem with the young generation is that they have no problems.”
Unlike, say, the recent far superior Lafange where the young post-teen friends face severe unemployment challenges, in Adults the problems seem far less grave, and flimsy. For instance, Billie (Lucy Freyer) loses her job after unintentionally insulting her boss. But she and her buddies are not overly worried: not the way their third-world counterparts would be. When her medical insurance bills are taken care of by a benefactor, she thanks him, though not in the way people usually do with their mouths.
Adults is a well-oiled cheeky series where the four friends Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Issa (Amita Rao) and Anton (Owen Thiele) spend all their waking hours together. For someone who has never been a groupie, this kind of clinginess would be problematic, even if you have OD-ed on Dil Chahta Hai and the likes.
In one particularly cringy show of camaraderie, Billie is seen on the potty while the rest of her roomies are crowding her with advice as she is having trouble defecating. When she emits blood they want to know where that came from…
Get the picture? These are friends who don’t give one another any room to breathe, or even breed. Every sexual encounter gets a community treatment. These characters share EVERYTHING and don’t know where and when to let go.
The actors get the sense of asphyxiating kinship right. But they fail to make their characters likeable, provided they were meant to be liked on the writing table. Issa, for example, who is played by an actress of Indian origin Amita Rao, is borderline annoying in her busybodiness and an inflated sense of self. She seems to have been scripted as vexatious.
Anton, the token gay in the group, is conferred with that peculiar wisdom which homosexuals are often blessed with in serials. While showing a striking common sense in daily dealings, he is also foolish enough to get hitched with a criminal whom he tries to run over in panic.
There is no dearth of physical action in Adults. While the endless activities of the characters and their unbroken chattiness are interesting, there is no life beyond the surface. None that I could detect. What lies beneath? Probably, nothing.
