“The show is not ‘naked reality’. It’s got beautiful clothes on.” This is what Neena Gupta had to say about her show, Masaba Masaba. Masaba Masaba is loosely based on the real life of fashion designer, Masaba Gupta and her actress mother, Neena Gupta. Not everything we see in the show is real. Some events are allusions to reality whereas others are completely constructed for entertainment purposes. The show also maintains a distance from taking any names. For example, Masaba’s on-screen divorce with her musician husband, Vinay can be linked with her real-life divorce with film producer, Madhu Mantena Verma. We also see Neena get frustrated with being out of work and finally resorting to Instagram to ask for substance roles in movies, just like she did in real-life. She goes on to shoot for Badhaai Ho with Gajraj Rao.

Creative non-fiction is a style of writing which creates factually accurate narratives. It is used to creatively construct narratives around real-life incidents to make them interesting and saleable. Masaba Masaba operates on similar lines. It takes actual incidents from the life of the celebrity mother-daughter to create a narrative full of entertainment and drama. The show blurs the lines between fact and fiction as both seamlessly merge into each other. It will leave you googling what happened in real-life and what didn’t. 

However, as Neena Gupta says, the show’s reality isn’t without a rose tint in it. It has caricatured queer representation as we see in Micky’s character and stereotypes related to Bollywood are also present. But then, what makes the show real is the authentic mother-daughter relationship that we get to see, the failures and disappointments that the celebrities undergo and how it affects their mental health. The show also talks about the challenges that women face in showbiz which is again, a very real issue. 

The fact that Masaba Masaba is a fictionalized version of Masaba Gupta’s real-life helps in getting traction for the show as we live in a Bollywood-obsessed world. A light and fun watch, Masaba Masaba shows you the reality of the celeb world with a pinch of salt.