The Vanishing Lie-o-metre or what I learned from KWK S8

Illustration/Uday Mohite

The finale of Koffee with Karan, in a season that set the bar low, featured Zeenat Aman and Neetu Kapoor. Watching the strangely staccato proceedings, I wondered if one Fabricare couch is perhaps not enough for two big lives. I kept returning to the more satisfying fun in one of the show's all-time best episodes - the finale of Season 1, also featuring Zeenat Aman and Hema Malini. Even then, they had seemed cooler than all the previous guests. Their uncommon and adventurous lives lent a rich ease. As they had no skin in the game, their irreverence ran deeper in the innuendo about discriminations and sexual exploitation they had survived in an unabashedly male-dominated industry.

That male domination displayed itself fully in an episode featuring Sanjay Dutt and Anil Kapoor in Season 3, replete with bro-jokes and an inherently conservative attitude to women. An awkwardly perched third guest, Kangana Ranaut, who participated in the rapid fire but was not eligible to compete for a prize, revealed the power dynamics of the industry as this column noted then - and boy, has that cast a long shadow.

Conspicuous by its absence in that episode was something core to the show's mischief and verve. The lie-o-metre, a buzzer KJo would gleefully press whenever guests gave politically correct answers to naughtily pointed questions. The lie-o-metre celebrated double meanings and their ability to house subversive truths. Like an older "vulgar" or more unabashed popular cinema, it acknowledged unacceptable but real feelings and uncategorizable relationships. Earlier we consumed Stardust for this rasa. Kofee with Karan was television's Stardust.

The lie-o-metre's absence on the Kapoor-Dutt episode, testified that these men were not open to question and teasing. Only they can make the jokes, only they can assert the truth, the heart of the #BoreMatKarYaar patriarchy in culture and politics.

KJo seemed to poke at this patriarchy himself, with his unlabelled queerness, which came into its own in episodes like Deepika and Sonam dissing Ranbir in Season 3. The vanished lie-o-metre symbolises the vanishing of much of the show's spikiness - but so much else.

It may surprise you to recall that old seasons of Koffee with Karan had 25 episodes, followed by a whole episode of season highlights. Like all entertainment, it gave abundantly. Now there are only ten episodes. No recap, because where's the fun to relive? Bloated with sponsors, the Koffee hamper a botoxed version of its earlier picnic basket, take up the space once kept for masti. The games are childish (three words that begin with D? Am I D for Dreaming? Is this Khushi's H for Homework?).

Compare Deepika in Season 3 and even Zeenat in Season 1 to them in this season - they are now merely on-brand versions of themselves. The heterogeneity, though, within admittedly snobby limits, of the show has given way to a dreary homogeneity. Hymns to capitalism and monogamy have replaced hosannas of hedonism. The show remains highly successful, but yeh jeena bhi koi jeena hai, haan Lallu? It is a situationship training us to expect very little from anything.

Yet, there's Karan Johar. In some ways the show is his cultural autobiography. Should we squeeze the lie-o-metre when he sighs for Koupledom or when he yearns for Bollywood's messier, more libidinal past? The last remaining double meaning, he makes me hope for a return to fun yaniki, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com