‘Bollywood Wives’ Is an Accidental Documentary About India’s Gilded Class

“People have this misconception about us, that we have these oh-so-glamorous lives,” a woman pleads. “But that’s not really true.” This is one of the eponymous spouses in the new Netflix series “The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives,” and in the show’s trailer she is promptly undercut by another Wife, who smirks and giggles: “Of course we go shopping in a Rolls-Royce. Is there any other mode of transportation?”

“We’re actually ridiculous,” chimes in Wife No. 3.

“But all together it’s fabulous,” finishes Wife the 4th.

These are the latest residents of the sparkly, dust-free world of the Rich Wife Reality TV Show — now extending toward the Indian market, because the entertainment value of watching obliviously wealthy people put themselves on display transcends nation and culture. You need not remotely know who these women are, or which Hindi film actors they’re connected with, to immediately understand what is being promised here. Everything you need is conveyed via snide confessionals, theatrical eye rolls and one muttered exhalation of the words “stupid cow.”

Being unhealthfully invested in the manufactured dramas of immaculately groomed, idle rich women isn’t a strictly modern phenomenon. People in Regency England gleefully speculated about the parentage of the Countess of Oxford’s children; for decades, American society gossip columns and issues of Town & Country dutifully chronicled the women who married into the Hearst and Astor families. But an explosion began in the early 2000s. A British tabloid obsession with the “WAGs” (wives and girlfriends) of British athletes led to a TV drama, “Footballers’ Wives”; in the United States, network dramas like “Desperate Housewives” gave way to the extremely profitable “Real Housewives” shows, with franchises from New York City to Salt Lake City, Dallas to D.C., and international spinoffs in Athens and Vancouver. There has now also been a rich-wife show for nearly every profession capable of generating millions: medicine, basketball, organized crime.

Each thrives on an identical formula. We follow a group of impeccably attired women as they go about managing their families and social lives. There isn’t much plot, but there are copious tears and charged moments as rivalries flare and disparaging comments are made about the quality of wigs or cosmetic dermatology. And sometimes, in between, something deeper is captured about the singular universes these women inhabit — the difference in social mores of wealthy wives in Atlanta and Miami, or the unique customs of those in New Jersey. A truly good rich-wife reality show is equal parts tawdry dramatic tension and anthropology.

“Bollywood Wives,” unfortunately, lacks both the sly self-awareness of the “Real Housewives” franchise and the dramatic ruthlessness. Of the four Wives, three are married to former Hindi film stars, and one is a former star herself, but all of these figures’ heydays have passed. It is their children who are now being groomed for film careers, and the Wives want you to know that their priorities are with their families — even if good mothering, in this universe, involves making your husband learn the waltz so that he can escort your daughter to her “coming out” at a Parisian debutante ball. The Wives hold vague jobs designing jewelry or clothing, but these professions tend to languish in the background of an endless series of lunches. For the most part, we watch them perform some light cosplay of the second “Sex and the City” movie: taking a whirlwind girls’ trip to Doha and lounging poolside in diaphanous caftans, or wearing Gucci to do volunteer work cleaning trash from a beach. The plot contrivances are laborious and low-stakes (in one the Wives pretend, unconvincingly, to have reservations about cosmetic work), and the subjects too pious, too sure of their own persecution and, frankly, too boring — even for me, an avowed librarian of 1990s Hindi-film arcana.

But in the show’s unguarded moments — when its slick pandering to the Netflix audience falls away, and the Wives slip into the wounded belligerence that comes so easily to the wealthy — it unintentionally offers unparalleled documentary insight into the nepotistic depths of the Hindi film industry. It may be asking us to care about one Wife facing public scoffing at her daughter’s Paris debut, but the real gag is her teenage son’s confidence that he, too, will become an actor in Hindi films, despite having a questionable grasp of the language and speaking with a placeless, affected accent. (Like any proud Indian mother of a mediocre Indian son, she beams as she brags about how cute he is — and like anyone who follows the industry, she surely knows the family name will take him far.) We watch one of the husbands shyly reveal to his Wife that, after years as a middling character actor, he has finally landed a key role with a notoriously exclusive director’s company. The unexpected sweetness of the moment lasts for approximately three seconds; in his next breath, he laments the public’s unfair complaints about industry nepotism, which cannot exist because, in his case, “It took me 25 years.”

But the most telling accidental revelations happen as the Wives frenetically prepare for a party hosted by the wife of one of India’s biggest stars, Shah Rukh Khan. His spouse, Gauri Khan, isn’t just a Wife; she presides over her own galaxy, orbited by the lesser Wives, who nervously titter and gather around her, basking in reflected glory. Too polite to smirk at their sequined outfits but not polite enough to let them pass unmentioned, Khan dryly chuckles about feeling underdressed. With a placid smile, she sweetly says that if only she were “just a designer,” she’d maybe, just maybe, have considered participating in a show like this. When asked about the four official Wives, she notes that she was a big fan of one “in the ’80s” and, after a lethal strategic pause, describes another as “funny.”

Khan’s sly verbal decimations reveal an essential truth about the gated world these people inhabit: Their status is not dependent on a Rolls-Royce or a debutante ball. It is governed by sharply delineated lanes of public stardom, on which the Wives have little claim of their own. Therein lies the curse of the rich and invisible. The wealthy of today are not always content simply with being rich enough to rent the same Qatari luxury suite Jennifer Lopez once stayed in. And what use is a Rolls-Royce if no one sees you getting out of it? The affliction of this class is a deep thirst to be witnessed, the same thirst that turns tech billionaires into Twitter obsessives and once-respectable actresses into lifestyle bloggers. For millionaire spouses hovering outside the universe of public recognition, Wife shows offer an easy conduit to validation: manufacturing a false bond of relatability by showing the public that they, too, must deal with bratty children, sad husbands, social betrayals and the criticism of naysayers.

But the only truly relatable moment in “Bollywood Wives” occurs as we watch the Wives jockey for validation from someone above their station — someone who actively reminds them that her being seen onscreen with them at all is an act of great generosity. After all, who can’t relate to the feeling of wanting the slightly mean cool girl at the party to acknowledge you?