Too many flies in this soup

Good soup is about more than its ingredients. In Killer Soup - a new Netflix series directed by Abhishek Chaubey-Konkona Sensharma stars as Swati Shetty, an aspiring chef who toils throughout the show's eight episodes over just one dish, a mutton paya soup.

- RAJA SEN

STREAMING TIP OF THE WEEK

Killing It, streaming on JioCinema, is the kind of show Killer Soup would love to have been. Starring Craig Robinson from The Office, the NBC comedy is about a man who ends up hunting and killing snakes for money. The plot is wild, and the humour is both absurd and relentless.

She has the ingredients but she doesn't have the balance, and this may also be said for this series. On paper, Killer Soup has a sharp director, a smashing premise ripped from the headlines, a superlative ensemble cast playing off each other, a riot of flavourful accents and whimsical twists, and yet...

In 2017, a woman in Telangana killed her husband, then poured acid on her lover's face in an attempt to pass him off as the husband. This is a news story wild enough to justify a true-crime thriller, but Chaubey - along with co-writers Anant Tripathi, Harshad Nalawade and Unaiza Merchant-went wackier not only by adding a soup-maker to their cauldron, but by casting the same man - Manoj Bajpayee - as the husband and the lover, the victim and the impostor. Add to that an obnoxious elder brother, a principled young policeman, an ambitious niece, and an old cop tripping out over a book of poetry.