Reporting Live
Cast: Parineeti Chopra, Deven Bhojani, Amol Palekar, Adil Hussain, Shekhar Suman, and Saswata Chatterjee
Director: Dhruv Tripathi
Star rating: ★★.5
Where to stream: Netflix
Hansal Mehta’s Scoop is everything Reporting Live aspires to be. The basic premise is similar: a female journalist gets caught up in a mess while doing her job. There’s a mafia/underworld track thrown in for good measure, too. But do the two measure up? For starters, Scoop had six episodes to flesh out its story and explore its characters, while Reporting Live has to wrap up everything in about two hours. That’s a significant difference, but is it enough to explain the gap in their impact?
The premise
Directed by Dhruv Tripathi, Reporting Live revolves around Sandhya (Parineeti Chopra), a journalist waiting for her first primetime scoop. Her team includes video journalist Vinod (Deven Bhojani). When a bridge collapses in Visargao, sending a bus plunging into the river and claiming 15 lives, the incident is dismissed as an accident. But Sandhya and Vinod stumble upon a darker truth: illegal sand mining and its connection to the bridge collapse. How the duo navigates threats to their lives and careers to bring the truth to light forms the rest of the plot.
What works
What Reporting Live gets right is its pace. Initially, there’s rarely a dull moment as we are introduced to Sandhya’s workplace, helmed by characters played by Adil Hussain and Shekhar Suman. Being a journalist myself, I found the newsroom atmosphere particularly relatable. There’s no unnecessary glamourisation of the profession (a la Alia Bhatt’s Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani). Instead, the film is closer to No One Killed Jessica, at least in its depiction of the round-the-clock stress that comes with the job.
But that’s about it. The story is decidedly predictable, with the reason behind Sandhya’s boss suppressing the sand-mining expose becoming apparent well before it should. The writing by Mihir Jadhav and Dhruv Tripathi does have its tender moments, particularly in depicting the bond between Sandhya and Vinod. The actors deserve credit for bringing warmth to their equation. However, the film misses out on the very thing its premise promises: the thrill and tension of an investigation that puts everything at stake.
The antagonist, played by Nasser, is another case of the familiar taking precedence over the unexpected. In the OTT age, when viewers have access to stories from across the world, predictability can be poison. The background score doesn’t help matters either, lacking the punch required to heighten the tension and becoming repetitive after a point.
Performance-wise, Parineeti Chopra does a decent job, while Deven Bhojani is wonderful, making you genuinely feel for his character. Shekhar Suman fits the role of the cunning businessman perfectly. Adil Hussain, meanwhile, has an effortless likeability about him.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, Reporting Live is a case of a promising premise let down by predictable writing. The brisk pace and solid performances make it watchable, but the film never quite builds the tension its subject demands. If Scoop showed how a journalist’s pursuit of a story could make for compelling drama, Reporting Live is content with merely telling one. In a story about journalists chasing the truth, that’s a rather underwhelming scoop.