Credit: Special Arrangement
Karan Johar’s Dharmatic Entertainment is keeping the Indian audience’s thirst for quintessential reality television drama satiated with its newest show, ‘The Tribe’. A group of rich and entitled Indian influencers are flown out to Los Angeles to live together and create content for social media. With cameos from some of Bollywood’s most famous stars to the bougie aesthetics of the Hollywood city, the show delivers exactly what one can expect: a giant serving of piping hot drama and mind-numbing entertainment. The harmony between this community of influencers, called CollabTribe, as they are attempting to revamp the brand, is thrown off balance with the arrival of a new member, Alfia Jafry. In between elaborate photoshoots and their extensively glamorous lifestyles, most of the ridiculous fights stem from Alfia being unable to fit into the ‘family’. The pettiest of conflicts emerge from the first-world problems of the girls stuck inside their bubbles of privilege.
‘The Tribe’, just like any other reality show, definitely demands a willing suspension of disbelief while consuming their heavily scripted content. However, the personalities do feel too whitewashed to appeal as much to the Indian audience as Dharmatic’s earlier production ‘The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives’ was able to. In fact, the multiple references to the Kardashians is signal enough of their target demographic, but it is doubtful if they will be able to, truly, keep up.