Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ray’ On Netflix, An Anthology Series Based On The Short Stories Of Satyajit Ray

The four-episode anthology series Ray is based on the short stories written by Satyajit Ray, one of India’s most famous filmmakers and authors. The four episodes have various styles, from thrillers to comedies, but they all take a look at people who are suffering in one way or another. Will these modern adaptations of Ray’s stories match the auteur’s vision?

RAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A young woman walks into a high-end rooftop bar in Mumbai, asks the bartender if they’re serving dinner, then recognizes someone at a nearby table.

The Gist: In the first episode, “Forget Me Not,” Ipsit Nair (Ali Fazal), the co-founder of rising company Chrysalis, is startled when Rhea (Anindita Bose), that woman in the bar recognizes him, and tells him about the time they spent together in a town that Ipsit swears he’s never visited. He considers himself a computer, never forgetting a fact or a memory, so he’s rightfully angry when this woman tells them they spent time together, especially because it was six months into his engagement to his current wife, Amala (Shruthy Menon).

One month earlier, Amala has just given birth, and Ipsit is confident that he can handle those first days as well as broker the deals he’s in the middle of. During all this, he greets his college buddy Anil (Yatendra Bahuguna) aka “Patchy,” whom he just hired to a low-level position, and goes baby clothes shopping with his assistant Maggie (Shweta Basu Prasad). She sniffs clothes she picks out for a baby named Maria, whom she claims is her sister’s newborn.

As Ipsit tries to figure out why Rhea thinks the two of them spent days together in a town he never visited, he finds himself forgetting other things, like important meetings or gassing up his car. His business partner Rahui (Neeraj Purohit) starts to get concerned over Ipsit’s mental health, and Ipsit’s psychiatrist is suggesting there might be signs of dementia, even though he’s only 33 years old.

After another member of his team, Gary (Gavin Methalaka) — another old friend, by the way — sends him pictures from the DSLR Rhea claims Ipsit had with him that week, he starts to flip through the pictures while driving and gets into an accident. When Maggie comes to visit him in the hospital, we find out that Ipsit’s lost weekend with Rhea may be the least of his worries.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Ray most definitely plays out like the Jordan Peele version of The Twilight Zone, with stories that are a bit more risque and swear-filled than the ones on the Rod Serling original, but weren’t nearly as creepy or scary.

Our Take: The creator of Ray, Sayantan Mukherjee, has tapped different writers and directors to adapt Ray’s stories for the screen. For “Forget Me Not”, director Srijit Mukherji and writer Srijit Mukherji have done an effective job of setting up just how much of an arrogant prick Ipsit is. The story gets jumbled a bit as we jump from the prior month to the current time, but Ipsit’s decline and how desperate he is to find answers is played well by Fazal.

When we saw the end of the episode, a plot twist we won’t detail here, we were wondering if the episode was written to drop clues about what happened all along. Once we got to that twist, we started to scratch our heads about how much of Ray’s story has changed and just how Ipsit started losing his mind.

One of the other issues here is that we hear that Ipsit has a vivid memory, almost a computer, but we’re not shown examples of it. We just have to take it on faith that Ipsit has this kind of photographic memory. But when the show is just over an hour, some verbal exposition is likely a more efficient way to get the message across.

All that being said, though, the writing and acting gave the hiccups in the story a but more credibility. The way the twist is revealed is shot in an innovative way that helps illustrate just what’s going on. And the episode shows just how Ray, who was better known as a director and novelist, can craft a pretty well thought out story.

Sex and Skin: Mostly innuendo, but nothing more than that.

Parting Shot: We don’t want to give away the ending, but let’s just say that Ipsit is left in a place where he’s alone with his malfunctioning computer of a brain.

Sleeper Star: Shweta Basu Prasad does a nice job as Maggie, whose loyalty to Ipsit seems to be unshakable, but it may be for a reason we don’t know about at first.

Most Pilot-y Line: No explanation why Ipsit calls his friend Anil “Patchy.” It seems like the kind of nickname that Anil never wanted, and didn’t want it following him to work.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re hoping that the hiccups we saw in the first episode of Ray don’t happen in the other three episodes. The first episode was well-acted and well-directed, giving us hope that will be the case.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Ray On Netflix