“Love Bully” ended up being a lot more fun than I thought it would be going in.

I didn’t know what to expect since I have not watched any Club Friday story before this. For those unfamiliar like I was, Club Friday is an anthology based on stories submitted by listeners to the radio programme by the same name. The shows consist of dramatised retellings of the stories in a few episodes each. “Love Bully” is a part of the 16th season of Club Friday, and depicts the story of two women named Night (Engfa Waraha) and Irene (Charlotte Austin).

They meet at Night’s bar the night Irene returns from the US, and hit it off instantly. They are quick to realise their feelings for another and equally quick to get together, which to be fair, makes sense given the short runtime. However, their relationship is threatened by the classic soap opera tropes of a meddling vamp character who tries to ruin their relationship as well as Irene’s career, an evil ex-boyfriend who aids her, and the rich mother who scoffs exaggeratedly and demands Night to stay away from Irene, but comes around by the end to support them.

Something I realised when I was halfway into the first episode was that I was going to have to shift my brain to a soap opera sensibility, and only then would the show make sense to me and I would find it enjoyable. As someone who has grown up with Indian soap operas, I was not unfamiliar with the tropes. If you have seen shows with women going off to sleep in heavy saris with loaded jewellery, seeing Irene and Night waking up with full faces of makeup won’t make you bat an eye.

If you are unacquainted with said tropes, you might find the show to have some glaring inconsistencies like, how is Night able to afford living in such a lavish house when she is struggling to pay rent and is not breaking even with the bar? And so on.

But you begin to have fun with it the moment you decide to take it for what it is. It is a soap opera that is so serious that it ends up not taking itself too seriously, and neither should you.

Rating: 3.75 out of 5

Streaming on- Viu