Mrs. & Mr. Shameem (Review): The Zee5 Series Chokes With Misery

After weekly following ‘Mrs & Mr. Shameem’ until its final (20th) episode dropped on youtube, I felt like I have either watched too much or too little of its two protagonists. Shameem (Nauman Ijaz) and Umaina (Saba Qamar) remain the tentpoles in this sweeping saga of an inner-city Lahori family. The series jumps time and so we watch the Shameems and their struggles over a 30-year period. Naturally, that’s a lot. So we don’t get enough periods of self-reflection. Instead, writer Saji Gul employs a retrospective narrative device where Shameem and Umaina – now an aged couple – reflect on their journey in front of a rapt audience in a televised interview.

What this does is leave room for the drama – and there is too much of it, mind you – in Shameem and his family’s life to unfold – relentlessly, mercilessly. Shameem belongs to a loud Punjabi family residing in androon Lahore. Minar-e-Pakistan and Badshahi Mosque make the backdrop of conversations on the rooftops. Shameem is the only son amidst three daughters, two of whom have husbands we see in every other Pakistani serial on television. Saqib Sameer notches up his character from ‘Kabuli Pulao’ and plays the lascivious, sterile husband who can’t take his eyes and hands off women (and sometimes men). Shameem’s other brother-in-law is on the other end of the spectrum. As a strict religious man, he uses words and fists to suffocate the lives of his wife and daughter lest they become wayward, loose women that are any morally-upright man’s greatest fear in our society.

The story’s central focus is on Umaina and Shameem; from their friendship, to marriage of convenience to surviving the society’s skewed gaze. The web series plods them through misery after misery until it tires out and the final time-jump of almost 20 years hints at a life spent in relative peace if not happiness. Saji Gul doesn’t give us a happy ending, for after so many struggles and so much loss, Shameem and Umaina can’t be happy, but at peace with their grief. It is their love for each other which ultimately helps them get to this point.

But love hustles for space in a series that is cluttered with so many socio-cultural issues that love burgeons somewhere in the background. There is family estrangement, premarital sex, a barren woman, black magic, domestic abuse, rape, postpartum depression, and endless scenes of societal judgement on AIDs patients, womanly men and manly women. The narrative expands in spurts, loses steam only to come back around which should not be surprising because writer Saji Gul’s earlier works like ‘O Rangreza’ and ‘Badshah Begum’ suffered similar fates.

Kudos to the makers though, for not making Shameem’s femininity the focal point of the series. It is there ofcourse, casually sewn into the story but never glaring in your face. Perhaps it’s Shameem’s comforting presence, his innate sweetness that prevents us from knowing anything more or unsettling about his character, exactly how Shameem’s saccharine attitude guards against the societal scrutiny on him. It is his way to survive in a world born to crush men like him, Nauman Ijaz plays Shameem as a man hiding all his shame under a cloak of kindness. In one scene he bemoans ‘hypermasculine’ men and spells out an out-of-character intellectual argument about gender norms which feels more like the writer talking through him but the scene gives a (false-hearted) impression of his self-assurance.

Umaina, on the other hand, starts off as a typical manic pixie dream girl. We all know her. She dances like no one is watching, but speaks like everyone is; Trash talks about sex, smokes on the roof, and leaves boys wretched in her wake, Shameem being one of them. For almost half of the series, the pun in the title of ‘Mrs. & Mr. Shameem’ justifies itself. The world is duty bound to indulge Umaina’s eccentricities. She annoys us, for as part of the society, we viewers are not used to watching women like her as protagonists on our screens. Saba Qamar gives us all the shades of Umaina; she is furious, free, and fragile, simultaneously breaking out of, and escaping into her shame.

But halfway across the series, a switch occurs. It is Shameem who starts acting reckless and Umaina who becomes the wiser one. The series drags at this point until, somewhere in the mountains some tender moments bring us back to Shameen and Umaina’s evolving companionship. But when misery strikes again, it feels like the makers are trying to draw us away from this ‘cursed’ couple or else we would come uncomfortably close to the hidden shames of their protagonists..

Finally, watching ‘Mrs. & Mr. Shameem’, a 2022 series, in 2024 is a disconcerting experience. We live in a post-‘Kabuli Pulao’ world now. A lot of Kashif Nisar regulars make the supporting cast of ‘Mrs. and Mr. Shameem’. But watching the two shows back to back has me overdosed on the androon-middle class Punjabi social drama genre that Kashif Nisar has mastered. A familiarity has set into all of Kashif Nisar’s households and that is not a good thing. As the socially-conscious ‘Mr & Mrs. Shameem’ would say, something needs to change.