Mistry review: A spiritless remake masquerading as a comedy detective show!

As Monk, Mistry aims to bring comedy to crime-solving but an interesting idea and the opportunity for a thoughtful adaptation are lost when the show is only interested in copy-pasting without context or cohesion.

Call it a lack of Indian shows to feed my curiosity, but I was introduced to English-language content early on with The Good Wife, Monk or Jane The Virgin that became comfort watches long before their Indian remakes. Though the originals weren’t always perfect but they were consistently engaging, something many Indian remakes seem to miss. And now, yet another remake joins this ever-growing list where an adaptation missed the opportunity of reframing familiar stories through a new lens. Mistry, a detective show, aims to tickle your funny bones more than challenge your brain just like Monk but ends up doing neither.

Adapted from the 2002 American series Monk, the show that earned Tony Shalhoub an Emmy, Mistry centers on Armaan Mistry (Ram Kapoor), a former police officer turned freelance consulting detective. His so-called superpower lies in his obsessive-compulsive disorder, heightened by the trauma of losing his wife, which helps him pick up on oddities and micro-details others miss like a dusty shoe, a crooked pattern in a tile or a nervous tick, clues that lead him to confidently declare that the case is cracked. And because even a handshake makes him uncomfortable, Mistry is always accompanied by Sharanya (Shikha Talsania), his nurse, assistant, and companion. A single mother, Sharanya is well versed in the art of navigating his “quirks” while helping him sustain a career solving crimes for the Mumbai police, particularly alongside his former colleague and current Crime Branch head, Sehmat Siddique (Mona Singh). 

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The premise is as interesting as it sounds. This is a man who does not have a high IQ but what makes him more intelligent than the rest is his inability to deal with germs, heights, uniformity, or physical contact - also considered his biggest flaw. That’s why most of his cases, which may seem like straightforward procedural puzzles, aren’t so simple. Everyone has their own quirks and only someone who can’t help noticing them like Mistry is able to connect the dots. But where the show falters is that it doesn’t know how to build toward this compelling premise. Instead of allowing the complexity of the cases or weird quirks of the characters to unfold naturally, this show reduces its structure to a mere farce only using each episode as an excuse to showcase one of Mistry’s quirks. The clues are even sloppily placed which further highlight not Mistry’s brilliance, but everyone else conveniently clueless. It’s almost like his so-called superpower only works because the rest of the world is dumb, as if to say any detective’s intelligence exists only in contrast to everyone else’s incompetence.

Mistry is also a near scene-to-scene copy of the original, which is why credit is given to Monk's creator, Andy Breckman and there’s nothing wrong with copying faithfully, if it's done well. But here, even that falls flat. For people who’ve seen the original, the comparisons are unavoidable; where Monk found humor and depth in his interactions with the world, Mistry barely registers beyond being an oddball with some jokes. And for those who haven’t seen Monk, the show still feels like something’s missing, largely because of its random choices in selecting what to adapt or not. The result is a supposed comedy-detective series that plays itself more like a string of bad puns and uninteresting cases, starting from the title, where Mistry is equated with some hinglish version of mysteries. And for a show that's about building itself from noticing details, there’s barely any investment in character arcs or emotional stakes, making the show disjointed where its quirky tone turns sour. 

Even with a solid cast like Ram Kapoor, Mona Singh, and Shikha Talsania who do their best to keep you invested, Mistry's over-stylized, overly lit, and hyper-designed aesthetic with unnecessary dramatics doesn’t leave much room for genuine engagement. What’s worse is that there are glimpses of potential, especially in moments where the cast or storyline steers away from blindly copying the original. But all of it is drowned in Mistry's obsession with word-for-word replication rather than thoughtful adaptation. In the end, Mistry doesn’t make you want to follow along with the investigation and laugh along with Mistry. Rather, it makes you want to let the characters solve it on their own and just tell you the result while you get on with your day. For a detective show, this is the biggest mystery of all - how it managed to lose its core purpose despite being a remake! 

Mistry is streaming on JioHotstar.

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