(L-R): Akshay Oberoi, Mohammad Samad, Yash Dholye, Rajesh Tailang in Selection Day
Photo Credit: Vaibhav Chaturvedi/Netflix
In what surely comes as a surprise, Netflix has not only renewed its critically-panned cricket drama series Selection Day — based on Indo-Australian author Aravind Adiga's book of the same name — for a second season, which will be called Selection Day: Part 2, but has also announced a release date: it's out April 22, 2019. Given the short gap between the first season, which released three weeks ago on December 28, and the second, it would seem that both seasons had been filmed back-to-back but are being released a few months apart. Selection Day is the story of two brothers who are pushed by their domineering father to become the two best batsmen in the world.
The first season of Selection Day was received unfavourably by most critics, including us. There was no deft or depth to the various storylines, and it was “unable to build any momentum or craft a powerful narrative”. Those who were drawn to the show for the cricket would have also been disappointed, and the show even suffered from geographical and continuity errors. Lastly, it had “nothing to say about modern-day India beyond its checkbox recognitions of the maladies stemming from cricket turning into a new capitalist tool, and the problems of identity faced by a new generation that's being pulled in different directions”, as we said in our review.
Created by British actor-turned-writer Marston Bloom (Harley Street), who also serves as the showrunner, Selection Day is a production of Anil Kapoor Film Company (AKFC) and London-based Seven Stories, co-founded by Anand Tucker (Girl with a Pearl Earring), who serves an executive producer alongside colleagues Colleen Woodcock and Jo McClellan, AKFC's Udayan Bhat, and directors Udayan Prasad (The Yellow Handkerchief) and Karan Boolani (24: India), who's also a creative producer on Selection Day.
The Selection Day cast includes newcomers Yash Dholye and Mohammad Samad, who play the two brothers Radha and Manju Kumar, and Karanvir Malhotra, who plays their rival classmate Javed Ansari. Rajesh Tailang (Mukkabaaz) played the father of the two boys Mohan Kumar, Mahesh Manjrekar (Kaante) starred as the cricketing coach Tommy Sir, Ranta Pathak Shah (Sarabhai vs Sarabhai) played the school principal Nellie, Akshay Oberoi (Gurgaon) played an investor named Anand Mehta, and Shiv Pandit (Shaitan, FIR) starred as Lord Subramanya.
Selection Day: Part 2 will release April 22, 2019 on Netflix.
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