SummaryThe limited darkly comedic crime drama series created by Robert Siegel chronicles how Indian immigrant Somen "Steve" Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani) created The Chippendales and the deadly actions he took against potential competitors.
SummaryThe limited darkly comedic crime drama series created by Robert Siegel chronicles how Indian immigrant Somen "Steve" Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani) created The Chippendales and the deadly actions he took against potential competitors.
Chippendales not only tells a worthwhile story, it takes it a step further and scrapes at the depths of its characters’ psychologies, revealing a meditation on good and bad that is anything but black and white.
A large part of the series’ undeniable watchability comes from understanding how Chippendales came to be so powerful, despite being so close (and so often) to tearing itself apart. Even if some of the show’s bigger moments fall back on the unsurprising credo that corruption always wins (or, rather, that dignity always loses), there’s plenty to gawk at here.
Instead of fulfilling its potential for greatness, Chippendales settles for being merely good—and is sure to leave some viewers with the uncomfortable sense of having delighted in a dramatization of real people’s death and heartbreak. But its true-crime exploitation quotient doesn’t even approach that of Ryan Murphy’s recent smash Dahmer—Monster or the Renée-Zellweger-fat-suit burlesque of The Thing About Pam.
Kumail Nanjiani seems unsure whether to play Bannerjee as hero or villain, and his switch from endearing to raging control freak is abrupt. The script is entertaining, however.
The result is an ideas-rich but disjointed series that feels like it’s tackling too much, yet somehow hardly enough, with a protagonist whose motivations are subject to whatever wild happenstance the scripts are setting up next.
Over eight 45ish minute installments, the miniseries never quite works its way to a distinctive tone or style or perspective, and never finds all that much to say about what it’s showing us beyond some vague clichés about greed, pride and the immigrant experience. ... There’s a difference between buying the right stuff, and knowing what to do with it. Welcome to Chippendales, sadly, doesn’t know what to do with it.