I’m pleasantly surprised that Hulu went with a second season for Delhi Boys. Sometimes it’s easy to get a second season, but it’s hard to get anything beyond that. So the real question now is whether Hulu is willing to go with a third season for a comedy whose episode count was reduced in year two. Six episodes isn’t exactly a ringing vote of confidence. Ultimately, it’s going to come down to how many people actually watched it. At the same time, six episodes also makes this one of the easiest shows on streaming to recommend. If you’re sitting there trying to decide what to watch, this is only about three hours of your life. It’s shorter than Avatar: Fire and Ash. What exactly is your excuse? You could literally finish the entire season before somebody else finishes James Cameron’s latest movie.

The first season followed brothers Mir and Raj, played by Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh, as they unexpectedly inherited their father’s criminal empire, only to discover that it involved far more than they ever imagined, including drug trafficking. Along the way they were guided, or perhaps dragged kicking and screaming, by Lucky, played by Poorna Jagannathan, who felt obligated to look after two men who couldn’t have been less prepared to run an organization like this. Season two picks up naturally from those events while expanding the world around them. One of the biggest additions is Fred Armisen as Max Sugar, a charismatic casino owner with the ability to launder money for the brothers. That relationship quickly grows into something much bigger as Lucky and Max develop a surprisingly complicated romance over the course of the season.

Don’t worry, the hilariously obnoxious district attorney with political ambitions is still around. Andrew Rannells once again steals scenes as the cartoonishly self-righteous antagonist, and he’s exactly the kind of character you love to root against. Delhi Boys has always been one of those crime comedies where you’re rooting for the criminals instead of the law. The more desperate Mir and Raj become trying to stay one step ahead of everyone around them, the funnier the series gets. This continues to be a wickedly talented ensemble and a wonderful showcase for performers who rarely get the opportunity to headline their own television series. It remains one of the few American comedies built around a predominantly South Asian cast without making that the only thing the show is about. Representation still matters because audiences deserve to see stories centered around different cultures that aren’t constantly explaining themselves.

Unfortunately, I also remember making another point in my review of season one, and it seems Disney either missed it or simply chose not to listen. Last year I argued that a show featuring such a specifically South Asian cast presented a rare opportunity to think differently about its audio description casting. Not because Dave Wallace wasn’t excellent. Quite the opposite. Dave is one of my favorite audio description narrators working today. His instincts for comedy are outstanding, and he somehow manages to squeeze laughs out of jokes that barely exist. I’ve seen him elevate weaker sitcoms simply through his delivery. His work on Shifting Gears is a perfect example. I honestly think the second season of that show played better in part because Dave understood exactly how to sell its comedic rhythm. So for me to suggest replacing Dave Wallace was never a criticism of Dave. It was because Delhi Boys represented a rare opportunity to bring authentic cultural representation into another corner of the production. The industry isn’t short on talented performers from diverse backgrounds. It just rarely gives them these opportunities. My hope was that an audio description provider would view this series as a chance to cast someone whose voice reflected the community being represented on screen.

Instead, Disney went in exactly the opposite direction. Rather than finding a narrator whose voice reflected the series, they removed the human element altogether and replaced it with synthetic speech. So welcome to another installment of my ongoing series, Wishing You Were Somehow Human Again. That title exists because Disney decided cutting costs was more important than paying for a human narrator on Delhi Boys. Since they’ve made that choice, I almost have to grade these tracks differently. I’m no longer evaluating a performance. I’m evaluating whether an artificial intelligence can convincingly imitate empathy, emotion, timing, and interpretation.

To be fair, as synthetic voices go, this one could have been much worse. There are far more obvious and far more unpleasant synthetic voices scattered throughout Disney’s various streaming services. Honestly, there are even human audio description performances on Disney programming that are weaker than this one, but I’ll save that conversation for another Abbott Elementary review. This synthetic voice occasionally attempts to interpret a scene. You can hear moments where it seems to be trying to add emphasis or shape a joke, almost as if someone has manually adjusted the inflection in hopes of influencing the comedy. That’s already more effort than many synthetic tracks receive, where the narration simply marches across every sentence in a perfectly flat line without any understanding of what’s happening on screen.

But that isn’t really praise. It’s more like ranking different varieties of food poisoning. I’m glad I don’t have the explosive diarrhea sweeping the nation right now, but I’d still prefer to just eat normal food. The difference is that you don’t have to constantly tweak, prompt, adjust, and manipulate a human performer until they finally sound convincing. A good narrator naturally understands context. They understand rhythm. They know when a pause helps a joke land and when an inflection makes a scene funnier. If anyone doubts that, go watch the first season of Delhi Boys with Dave Wallace’s narration and then compare it to this second season. The contrast is stark. One performer understands the punchline because he’s a person. The other only imitates understanding because someone tried to explain the joke through code.

I’ll keep beating this dead horse because I think it’s one of the biggest accessibility issues facing our community right now. I’m against synthetic audio description being adopted as broadly as it currently is. The fact that it has already spread into higher-profile scripted programming tells me these companies have looked at an accessibility feature that has never really been regulated or guaranteed and decided blind audiences will simply accept whatever scraps they’re given. Today it’s the narrator. Tomorrow it will be the writers. Eventually, if they can automate the entire process in-house, they won’t need outside audio description companies at all. This isn’t just about one show. It’s an existential problem for the industry, and the companies providing these services are often left treading water, hoping the next contract keeps them alive even as the work itself slowly disappears.

What Disney and other content providers continue to overlook is that every time they remove a human from the audio description process, they also remove an advocate for the show itself. Narrators promote their work. Writers promote their work. Audio description companies celebrate new releases and tell blind audiences when something is worth watching. Those people attend conventions, participate in panels, answer questions, and become ambassadors for accessibility. You can’t send a synthetic voice to Comic-Con. You can’t ask an algorithm to sit on a panel and discuss why audio description matters. Those human connections disappear the moment the humans do.

If I weren’t seeing Disney expand synthetic audio description onto more and more projects, I’d almost be tempted to think the company was simply trying to sidestep the conversation about the ethnicity of the narrator. But that would be the wrong takeaway. I still believe this series represented a rare opportunity to hire a South Asian narrator, someone who is alive, made of actual human flesh, and whose lived experiences could naturally complement the performers on screen. That’s difficult for me to say because it means suggesting someone other than Dave Wallace, and I genuinely think Dave is one of the very best narrators working today. But we also don’t know whether there’s another narrator every bit as talented who simply hasn’t been given the opportunity because the opportunity itself has now been replaced by code.

Disney loves spending hundreds of millions of dollars remaking movies that already exist. You remade Moana after barely a decade. Whether anyone wanted that is another conversation. But the money spent on one live-action remake could probably fund human audio description across Disney’s entire slate for quite some time. Imagine being able to advertise that every piece of content on Disney+, Hulu, FX, and your other platforms featured human-created audio description. That sounds like racing to the top of the mountain instead of trying to find the bottom. The company is always eager to explain away disappointing box office performances by pointing to intangible benefits like merchandise sales, streaming engagement, or strengthening the Disney brand. Well, human audio description has intangible benefits too. It creates advocates. It builds trust. It gives blind audiences people who will actively promote and celebrate your content. Those are benefits that a spreadsheet will never fully measure.

Thankfully, none of that changes the fact that Delhi Boys is still a terrific comedy. This isn’t a Rotten review simply because Disney couldn’t be bothered to give more thought to its blind audience. I still hope the show gets a third season, even if I’m a little nervous about the reduced episode order. The cast remains outstanding. Asif Ali, Saagar Shaikh, and Poorna Jagannathan continue to have fantastic chemistry, while Fred Armisen and Andrew Rannells slide effortlessly into the ensemble and help elevate the comedy. I even got a kick out of Max Sugar’s daughter being named Seven, and despite her limited screen time, she gets one of my favorite lines of the season when she quietly remarks that she misses the person she was before witnessing something completely ridiculous. That’s a beautifully dry joke. Delhi Boys deserves to be watched. It’s just a shame it’s narrated by code instead of a person. Code isn’t going to jump on social media and tell blind audiences they should watch the show. It isn’t going to appear on a panel, advocate for accessibility, or become another voice helping people discover great entertainment. Disney loses free promotion, the blind community loses advocates, and we all lose something human in the process. Fortunately, Delhi Boys remains hilarious enough that I still recommend it, even if Max Headroom is the one telling you what’s happening.

Fresh: 7.9/10