Koffee with Karan document card: Amid nepotism, sex playlists and play-it-safe guests, Karan Johar serves the identical brew

Koffee with Karan returned with great fanfare for its seventh season, this time on the OTT platform, Disney+Hotstar. Braving the 7th season itch, Karan returned with new episodes of his chat show featuring a couple of debutants and many old guests who made anywhere from their second to their seventh appearance on Karan’s couch. Or as he calls it now, the couch of manifestation.

Twelve episodes of the show are now streaming on the platform, and while there have been no epic controversies this year (throwback to Hardik Pandya’s boast about his sexual conquests or Kangana’s war cry on nepotism), this is a good opportunity to evaluate whether Karan and the team have brewed a fresh pot of coffee or served us vending machine ware.

Season seven started with Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt, the leading pair of Karan’s upcoming directorial, Rocky aur Rani ki Prem Kahani. While the pair had an interesting chat with Karan, and Ranveer bowled us over with his mimicry skills, what was a bit of buzz kill was Karan’s opening monologue

While one thought that this monologue would be reserved for just the first episode to welcome us to a new season, the rather pointless and frankly, badly written speeches have continued in every episode that followed. Conversation may be your strength Karan, but dialogue delivery is definitely not. Perhaps nix the foam and dive straight into the cuppa if you get to the 8th season?

Also, while we do understand that advertising pays for content, can we not have such force-fitted brand integrations, please? To randomly ask someone why their fashion is a cut above the rest or seek their opinions on diamonds mid-conversation, seems really forced and unnatural.

Koffee with Karan has always been a light-hearted and unabashedly frivolous show, something loyal viewers actually love about it. However, this year there were several moments when we actually went from cringe to wince. So, while we were enlightened about such a thing as a playlist for bedroom endeavours, or in some cases, vanity van endeavours, did Karan really need to ask multiple guests the same question? Perhaps a shift from television to an OTT platform made Karan and the creative team feel that they could focus for no particular reason on every guest’s sex life?

In fact, in Varun Dhawan and Anil Kapoor’s episode, Varun turned into Mahendra Watsa and offered sexual advice to people who ‘called in’. Also, as good-looking as Vijay Deverkonda is, asking a man whose career you can influence if he is open to threesomes, is not just unnecessary, it’s inappropriate. As fun as it was to see some equal opportunity objectification, the incessant inside jokes about who had sampled the cheese got quite tiresome after a while.