Review: ‘Do You Wanna Partner’ serves up more froth than flavour

The premise of the Prime Video series Do You Wanna Partner promises fizz: two women dare to launch a craft beer start-up in Delhi, taking on the boys’ club of the alcobev industry.

Shikha (Tamannaah Bhatia) and Anahita (Diana Penty) are best friends who set out to build their own brewery. Shikha is fuelled by the unrealised dream of her late father, Sunjoy (Indraneil Sengupta). Sunjoy’s beer brand Gondogol was snatched away by businessman Vikram Walia (Neeraj Kabi, sporting a Cruella-inspired hairdo to suggest a villainous streak).

Anahita is the pragmatic financial anchor, Shikha’s often lonely partner-in-entrepreneurship who is overcoming her own issues with being taken seriously at work.

Created by Mithun Gangopadhyay and Nishant Nayak and written by Nandini Gupta, Aarsh Vora, Nidhi Sethia and Gangopadhyay, the show also credits Pratik Kansara as a “beer consultant”. The idea of women championing an alcobev brand, staking their claim in a male-dominated business and challenging gender stereotypes could have been fun if the story and direction by Archit Kumar and Collin D’Cunha had been more imaginative.

The Hindi series rewinds to 1999 Calcutta to anchor Shikha’s motivations, but the flashbacks barely register as an emotional bedrock. We know little about Anahita’s life, besides the fact that she lives with her...

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