HYDERABAD : In a popular meme, a perfect couple is said to comprise one who likes cooking and the other who likes cleaning. So, when both get to do two everyday, essential activities together, they don’t resent one another for they are doing the work they enjoy. Miss Perfect takes this simple observation and reverse engineers a premise out of it. What if a guy who liked cooking and a girl who liked cleaning meet? What if they meet in circumstances, say like a pandemic, where they remain conveniently undisturbed for most of, if not, all the time? What if the entire story is held together by a white lie and a double identity, making the series exciting to the audience privy to this information while one lead character is blissfully? What if there is some comedy with supporting characters thrown into the mix, with some additional commentary? The result of all these questions is the eight episode series.
The pilot episode opens to Lavanya Rao (Lavanya Tripathi)’s two big problems. One, she is obsessed with cleaning. Two, she believes that white lies are harmless. While the series opens to Delhi-based Lavanya meeting a therapist, words like OCD are not thrown around. Much like say, Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory, we never get it explicitly spelled out. We are introduced to it as a personality quirk and that is how it remains to us for the rest of the show.
Back to the story, Lavanya, a management consultant, moves to Hyderabad to lead a project. A translation from corporatespeak tells us that she is a third party person brought in to fire inefficient people in a software company. Here, we find out that Rohit (Abijeet Duddala) works in the same company Lavanya is working at. Lavanya also lives in Shanti Nilayam, the same gated community Rohit lives in. An all too convenient plot detail or is it just two people living close to their common place of work? Before we can entirely process this information, we are also introduced to Lavanya’s father (Harsha Vardhan), a Mumbai-based architect who has an apartment in Shanti Nilayam, a building he constructed. We also meet Jyothi (Abhignya Vuthaluru), an aspiring singer from Gajwel, who works as a cook/cleaner in Shanti Nilayam. She cleans but does not cook in Rohit’s house because Rohit loves to cook. She cooks but does not clean in Lavanya’s house because Lavanya loves to clean. You see where I am getting? To neatly stack up the set of similarities, much like Lavanya, we are also shown that Lavanya cannot cook to save her live while Rohit leaves everything in a state of mess. As pandemic hits and Jyothi could not go to Shanti Nilayam to work, Lavanya goes to Rohit’s place. And continues to go. Because white lies. Cleaning. Cooking. Romance.
Written by Shruti Ramachandran and Francis Thomas, the screenwriting duo that has also written the short film Ilaimai Idho Idho from Putham Pudhu Kaalai (2020), Miss Perfect carries the themes of romance in the era of covid from the writers’ previous work. While the former dealt with an old couple who are shown turning into their younger selves with the help of two younger actors (Kalidas Jayaram and Kalyani Priyadarshan), Miss Perfect plays out a cutesy, more surefooted romance between the older characters of Harsha Vardhan and Jhansi, juxtaposed against a younger couple. Since Miss Perfect is a series and not a film, we also get elaborate arcs and a jasoosi subplot involving Jyothi and her influencer brother.
While the budding romance of Lavanya and Rohit is Miss Perfect’s main plot, which is held together by Lavanya pretending to be Lakshmi, a house help, the film also plays another kind of pretension in parallel. The pretension of pragmatism over passion. Rohit wants to be a chef, but is comfortable with his IT job that keeps his controlling, conformist mother (Roopa Lakshmi) happy. Jyothi wants to be a singer but is forced to make ends meet by working as a domestic help.
Even the building’s watchman moonlights as a fitness enthusiast, trying to build his body at every chance he gets. Isn’t pursuing one’s passion its own form of romance? While these subplots come at the cost of one’s patience at times in the middle of the series, their arcs eventually exit with a decent pay-off. Miss Perfect is short and sweet, like a chick-lit novel. Its narrative structure feels better suited to a film than a series, but in 2024, when films can end with cliffhangers, series can also end like films I guess.
Miss Perfect
Cast: Lavanya Tripathi, Abijeet Duddala, Abhignya Vuthaluru, Harsha Vardhan, Jhansi, Roopa Lakshmi
Director : Vishwak Khanderao
Rating : 3/5