‘Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya’ series review: Kay Kay Menon struggles to score in this facile school of mess
Spread into relatively shorter seven episodes, the series stretches its runtime on occassions with repetitive jokes. and its perpetual reliance on silliness to make a point doesn’t quite lead to a fruitful whole.
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Spread into seven short episodes, the series stretches its runtime on occasion with repetitive jokes, and its perpetual reliance on silliness to make a point doesn’t quite lead to a fruitful whole
Updated - July 24, 2026 04:26 pm IST
Kay Kay Menon in ‘Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya’ | Photo Credit: Prime Video
There is nothing ideal about Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya. It often feels like a perfectly designed template on paper that slips into monotony when translated on screen. The comedy-drama tries to fit into the post-Panchayateraof streaming landscape, where a feel-good atmosphere is presented along with a touch of social satire. It is produced by Posham Pa Pictures, known for Maamla Legal Hai, in which dysfunctionality pervaded inside a courtroom with a low-on-morals, high-on-charm protagonist at the centre. Now, keep the dysfunctionality intact, replace the courtroom with a government school and transfer qualities of the eccentric lawyer there to the opportunistic headmaster here. Congratulations, you have another energetic twin with a serious identity crisis.
With Biswapati Sarkar and Sameer Saxena as creators, Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya takes a new setting, imagines a host of quirky characters and fills it up with a superficial logline. Headmaster Gyaneshwar Tripathi (Kay Kay Menon) is driven by a dream to transform his school in order to win a government-sponsored training programme in Cambridge. Even though his actions are backed by a selfish desire, Tripathi is developed as a sensitive man, sometimes too gullible and foolish to be able to rightly administer a failing school. Even his group of staff feature a sketchy mix of a conservative science teacher, an idealist physics teacher, a strict and most-feared Hindi teacher (Abhimanyu Singh) and an empathetic counseller (Naveen Kasturia).
The writing seldom scratches beneath the surface. While the show thinks of itself as a biting satire on the frail state of government school infrastructure, its scenes slip into numbing hyperbole, desperate to rake in easy laughs while forgetting the larger picture. So, an episode about the removal of kheer frommidday meal might bring memory of a similar reality, but the show is never as self-aware to be actually critical of it. Another episode features a politician urging Gyaneshwar to teach fabricated history to students, which again has parallels to reality, but the intention is only to ridicule, as the overtly absurdist parts don’t quite come together to make a cohesive statement. There is an acute disinterest in engaging further, thereby creating the illusion of addressing real issues as the caricatures end up building an alternate meaningless realm.
A from ‘Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya’ | Photo Credit: Prime Video
Also, for a show set in a high school, it is surprising how little understanding the makers seem to have about the lives of kids, who walk and talk like adults. Like a student from Darjeeling, who is stereotypically made to have a liking for making Chinese food as he runs a secret stall in a dilapidated building. Then an extended scene featuring a typical monologue about chasing your dreams and doing what you love follows. The kids stage a protest, offer tense arguments and blackmail teachers — all the while serving the whims of the writers, who take away innocence from their lives.
Even the dialogues are filled with lazy wordplay, like a line with junk food and junkies, or another one used by a character to describe Gyaneshwar as “Ye principal ka koi principle hi nahi hai (This principal has no principle)”. With Biswapati Sarkar also serving as the co-writer, the dialogues and scenes carry a stale resemblance to some of his mid-2010s-era YouTube sketch videos for TVF. Stray moments of emotional resonance are then force-fitted to create a semblance of depth to the characters, when all it leaves behind is a sour after taste.
The same confusion and ambiguity translate even to the performances, especially that of Kay Kay Menon, who doesn’t seem as comfortable playing Gyaneshwar as the screenplay reduces him to a few gags. The seasoned actor fails to create any magic as the show seems to make him a figure he struggles to embody with conviction. His restraint doesn’t go along well with the show’s exaggerated treatment. Even the combined efforts of the rest of the cast, including Archana Puran Singh, Naveen Kasturia, Abhimanyu Singh and Deven Bhojani, remain functional.
