Jagame Sangeetham Review
BOTTOM LINE
Superficial Remake, A Major Misfire
PLATFORM
PRIME VIDEO
RUNTIME
4 Hrs 12 Mins [8 Episodes]
What Is the Show About?
Balu, a talented Carnatic singer, trains under his famous grandfather, Shastri, to carry on the family’s musical tradition. Amidst severe financial problems, Balu takes up modern music projects, joining hands with a young woman, Pallavi. Drawn into a new world, his relationship with Shastri breaks down. Things worsen when his estranged uncle, Thyagaraju, returns to settle old scores.
Performances
In terms of casting choices, Jagame Sangeetham is a major disaster. Shockingly, none of the big names deliver. Srikanth is slightly the better of the lot, while the likes of Prakash Raj and Madhoo come up with cold, detached performances. Sijju Menon and Shafi don’t get ample scope to make an impression. Raghu Babu and Rocket Raghava are wasted in inconsequential roles. Akshay Lagusani is just about passable, and his female counterpart Sushmita Shetty is strictly adequate.
Analysis
Bandish Bandits, Amazon Prime’s Hindi show that inspired this week’s OTT release, Jagame Sangeetham, has the narrative beats of a modern-day Shankarabharanam in terms of its ambition, chronicling the universal conflict between classicality and modernity through an insider’s lens. It was an intimate, vibrant fusion of two contrasting worlds with the soul of an old-school family drama.
Alongside an accessible backdrop, focusing on a family’s tryst with purist musical traditions, its characters are driven by an innate quest to find their signature in a fast-changing world. Much like its protagonists trying to break free from the confines of their past, the show is a vivid burst of colours, representing a world of endless possibilities waiting to greet them with rapt enthusiasm.
Jagame Sangeetham always had strong source material to live up to, but what comes out of it is a unidimensional, flavourless frame-by-frame remake with miscast actors, mediocre music, and a complete lack of authenticity in its setting. The show has no sense of groundedness, mechanically replacing Hindustani music with Carnatic, Jodhpur with Rajahmundry, and Naseeruddin Shah with a hammy Prakash Raj.
The ultimate power of any story lies in how it brings a world alive and makes you care for the people inhabiting it. Jagame Sangeetham does none of this. People talk, fight, sing, and fall in love simply because this is a product packaged for a new audience, and they’ve rehearsed their lines. It is evident that the team either cares little or is ill-equipped to handle the material with the care it demands.
By merely substituting Carnatic in place of the Hindustani tradition, it pays no heed to its specifics, apart from superficial mentions of ragas, gamakas, and akaarams in an ancient house that resembles the scores of vast sets seen in mainstream Telugu films. While equating the sustenance of a lineage to a reality show challenge, there’s an outsider-ish approach to the execution that robs the story of its soul.
It’s particularly jarring to watch a show about music where the songs, by a strangely out-of-form Vishal Chandrasekhar, fail to make any impression across both classical and contemporary fusion tracks. Rajahmundry is an interesting choice for a musical setting, yet the show offers no sense of the town, its culture, or its place within Carnatic traditions.
The family drama clearly needed some reworking too. The unquestionable authority of Shastri in the household and the stranglehold he has on his family feel completely out of place. Subplots like a father stuck in debt as a failed musician, an uncle secretly taking up jingles for a living, and a woman enduring the hypocrisy of an egoistic patriarch don’t feel the least bit relevant in this Telugu context.
Where the show truly misses the mark is the love story between Balu and Pallavi, its best opportunity to strike a chord with a new-age viewer (who may not appreciate the setting or the old-school drama). There’s absolutely no chemistry between the leads. Their conflict around falsetto voices feels trivial. Pallavi’s dysfunctional family looks intriguing on paper but struggles to translate well to the screen.
Somehow, you feel that the team doesn’t want to know how music is made or how a musician lives in this part of the world. The indifference is too obvious to ignore. It just wants to take up a hit show, find its equivalents in the Telugu land, execute it, pack its bags, and leave. At a time when the prospect of a remake in a post-OTT world rests on shaky ground, Jagame Sangeetham is a costly miss.
Music and Other Departments?
The songs by Vishal Chandrasekhar are a huge disappointment, given his solid grounding in melody and semi-classical compositions. The approach towards the soundtrack is quite lackadaisical and lazy. The production design doesn’t help the show’s cause, resembling typical joint-family sets in commercial films. Raj Thota’s cinematography is too basic, doing little justice to the setting. The adaptation is generally poor, relying on quick-fix solutions to match the original.
Highlights?
Story with a universal appeal, mirroring clashing musical traditions
The last set of episodes fare marginally better.
Drawbacks?
Lacks strong emotion or relatability
Superficial writing and miscast actors
Mediocre music
Did I Enjoy It?
No
Will You Recommend It?
Not really. Go for the original Hindi version (Bandish Bandits) with subtitles. The effort is totally worth it.
Jagame Sangeetham SeriesReviewed by M9 News
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