Maitreyi Ramakrishnan leads Netflix’s dance comedy ‘Best of the Best’
Missing Never Have I Ever? Of course you are? ‘Heat Waves’ are back in the season and quite literally, and so is Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, who is coming back to Netflix with a new movie. Only she has left Devi’s romantic carry-on behind and jumped straight into Bollywood fusion dancing.
Her new film is Best of the Best, coming to Netflix September 18th. She stars alongside Priyanka Kedia as Maya and Anjali, childhood best mates who join UCLA’s Bollywood-fusion team and realise this is not some casual hobby between lectures.
At first, it is all excitement, but you know how these things go. The rehearsals start biting, and palpable personalities clash.
Ramakrishnan has shown she can move, mind you. Anyone who watched the Never Have I Ever finale will remember Devi and Kamala dancing at their grandmother’s wedding, and that scene had people made up because it felt as beautiful as it was joyful.
Now she gets an entire film built around that energy, which is a massive leap from one memorable sequence. Instead of worrying about school crushes, this time, she is dealing with competition pressure that could send even the calmest person west.
Hasan Minhaj co-wrote the film with Prashanth Venkataramanujam, his former Patriot Act collaborator, and he also appears as Professor Hamza Latif. So he has not merely lobbed a script over the wall and disappeared; he is very much involved.
The story comes from the Bollywood-fusion circuit on American college campuses, where South Asian students build community through performance while surviving university life. That gives the film more substance than a standard dance competition plot.
Lena Khan directs after working on Never Have I Ever, so there is trust there with Ramakrishnan. Chaneil Kular, Ankur Rathee, Shreya Navile, Nico Greetham, Lilly Singh, Janina Gavankar and Saara Chaudry also join the cast.
So no, Devi is not coming back, before anyone gets ideas, but Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is still in the Netflix fold. This time she is swapping relationships for stage, and that sounds like exactly the comeback worth watching.