Sunil Grover and a perky Adah Sharma somehow salvage Sunflower 2, observes Deepa Gahlot.

A hugely popular and wonderful American Web series called Only Murders In The Building is being mentioned here because it is a good example of how quirky characters can be made endearing instead of annoying as in Sunflower (2021).

The series was created by Vikas Bahl, who directed the first season, and has handed the reins for the second to Navin Gujral.

There are similarities between the two shows.

Both are set in a housing society, where a murder takes place.

Both are full of weird residents.

 

The Sunflower team is led by the twitchy, OCD-afflicted protagonist Sonu (Sunil Grover) and the meddlesome chairman Dilip Iyer (Ashish Vidyarthi).

In the first season, one of the residents Raj Kapoor (Ashwin Kaushal) was killed, supposedly by poison injected by his neighbours, Mr and Mrs Ahuja (Mukul Chadda-Radha Bhatt), into the coconut he orders every morning.

But when the cops — Inspector Digendra (Ranvir Shorey) and his deputy Tambe (Girish Kulkarni) — arrive to investigate, all clues seem to point to Sonu.

The season ended with Sonu being kidnapped.

In Season 2, he reappears, looking grimy but otherwise none the worse for the wear for a person who made his way back to Mumbai from Punjab. Meanwhile, it is discovered that Kapoor’s corpse has an eye missing, and the already clueless cops are even more baffled.

Most of the characters from Season 1 return.

The new entrant is Adah Sharma as Rosie, the bar dancer to whom Kapoor willed his lavish apartment in Sunflower.

The murder mystery ideally ought to have ended in the last season that was needlessly padded with Sonu’s interactions with his neighbours and girlfriends (the HR head in his office is particularly predatory), and Iyer’s bigotry.

The stuffing now extends to the new season where more characters pop up, who may have had a motive to kill Kapoor.

Instead of a taut mystery padded with comedy, there are too many unfunny scenes, right in the first episode is the unsavoury sight of Ahuja getting a body wax!

Good for the series then that Rosie makes her high-heeled entrance, carrying a giant teddy bear, so that the remote picked up to change the channel is placed back on the couch.

The antics of Sonu, who is portrayed as an innocent Mamma’s Boy of 35, and claims to be super intelligent, are even more irritating in this time round, when he falls in love with Rosie.

She charmingly strings him along but then is shown to be the type who even flirts with the building’s security guard.

There was not much plot to begin with, so time is wasted on the romance between Digendra and Mrs Ahuja, the declaration of her bisexuality by Iyer’s daughter, scenes with a colour blind tailor and the deviousness of the maid, Kamini (Annapurna Soni), who knows much more than the cops have been able to figure out.

If there are small bursts of humour, it is because Sunil Grover is a fine comic actor, and along with a perky Adah Sharma, somehow salvages Sunflower 2.

But there really, really is no need for a Season 3, which must be in the works, because all the red herrings are still not reeled in, and Sonu is dropped into a bigger vat of pickle!

Sunflower 2 streams on ZEE5.

Sunflower 2 Review Rediff Rating:



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