‘Call Me Bae’ review: A woefully thin riches-to-rags comedy

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Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is a 1975 film by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It's one of the most disturbing and difficult viewing experiences in cinema, a long series of degradations visited upon a group of teens by sadistic fascists. It runs just under two hours.

Call Me Bae is a new series on Amazon Prime, eight episodes of sitcom length. I’m not sure watching Salò and then watching it all over again isn’t a less painful use of four hours than the same time spent with Bae. After socialite Bella ‘Bae’ Chowdhury (Ananya Panday) is caught with her hunky trainer, her husband, Agastya (Vihaan Samat), tosses her out of their home.

She returns, defeated, to her family’s Delhi mansion. But the Rajwanshes have decided the scandal is too much for them; golden boy Samar, Bella’s brother, is in business with Agastya as well. Bae is offered a one-way ticket to Los Angeles (“Malibu wala ghar").

Instead, she impulsively heads to Mumbai. There’s an ominous mention in the first episode of a course in ‘social media journalism’ that Bae did. Sure enough, Vir Das turns up as TRP-hungry anchor Satyajit Sen—working at a channel called TRP.

Bae, disgusted by his bullying of an actress on air, drunkenly rants about Satyajit for her legion of Instagram followers. Through a sequence of events too contrived to even recap, this gets her hired as an intern at TRP—by Neel (Gurfateh Pirzada), an anchor who does ‘real news’ that no one watches. There’s a bit of Schitt’s Creek in the idea of Bae’s descent from riches to comic poverty.