Team FC
The Awasthi family is back for a five-episode run, with each episode dedicated to one member of the happy-go-plucky household. The town is unnamed so that middle-class nostalgia isn’t constrained by culture, but also because everyone has a different accent.
At one point, it used to be cute that the ‘seasons’ of Yeh Meri Family are literally seasons. After summer and winter, the third season of the show unfolds in spring (tagline: “Spring of the 90’s”) – which, ironically, robs the setting of whatever little visual personality it had.
As a franchise, Yeh Meri Family slips in some interesting social observations.These are perceptive themes. But the expression is didactic. Even naturalism is a prototype here. Every character is reduced to the most basic version of themselves.
They all talk like they’re in a daily soap, in tandem with the background score. The show commits the classic mistake of framing a physical rewind as an intellectual downgrade.
It’s all too much — or should I say, three much? Mind you, that’s a better cringe-pun than the Awasthis manage in any of the 40-but-should-have-been-25-minutes episodes.
I have almost nothing to add this time. The same problems are inherited by Season 3 of Yeh Meri Family: The Amar-Chitra-Katha-esque treatment, the privatisation of Nineties nostalgia, the cloyingly sweet writing, the curated feel-goodness.