The Koffee couch is gradually evolving from a manifestation couch to a compatibility couch. Though host Karan Johar manifested for long-awaited love at the end of the latest episode of Koffee with Karan season 9, most of the episode was a litmus test for Vijay Deverakonda and Rashmika Mandanna. They appeared together just eight months after tying the knot. Over the years, the show has gradually become a platform for A-list star couples to put their compatibility to the test during crucial phases of their relationships. But are they really testing their compatibility or carefully manufacturing it for a limited time, as they do for the gram?The Virosh whitewashVijay and Rashmika seemed far more secure than Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, who opened the previous season in October 2023. Since then, they’ve become parents to two daughters — Dua and Devi. But at that point, their joint appearance on the show was more of a statement to their naysayers who had given in to believe the rumours of their marriage being on the rocks. Though they’d been married for almost five years till then, they unveiled their wedding video on the episode for the first time — silencing many sceptics and tearing up a vulnerable Karan Johar in the process.Vijay and Rashmika kept their relationship hush-hush for years, ever since they first met on the set of Parasuram’s 2018 Telugu romantic comedy Geetha Govindam. They didn’t even acknowledge it publicly even after the engagement, and broke the news only within the week of their big, fat Udaipur wedding in February earlier this year. Though they’ve been appearing together on a few podcasts for the promotion of their new movie, Rahul Sankrityan’s Telugu period action epic Ranabaali, Koffee with Karan was the first time they dropped their guard (or did they?) to talk about themselves as a unit, instead of only their characters.Unlike Ranveer and Deepika, they had little to prove. Not only because they’re too newly wed for people to be casting doubts on their marriage, but also because unlike Bollywood stars of their age — who have grown up on a steady diet of Koffee with Karan — they’re not too equipped with the saucy overtones of the chat show. Responding to Ananya Panday and Sara Ali Khan’s overlong yet cheeky cheese metaphor with “so cute” or “Yes, I’ve also gotten addicted to a cheeseboard since then” is just plain tasteless. Instead of milking the cheese metaphor, all Rashmika could come up with was a bland diet update.If Rashmika couldn’t dial up her sass, her husband couldn’t contain his red-flag persona. For years, the man has defended the actions of his breakthrough titular character in Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s 2017 Telugu romantic drama Arjun Reddy. But he still hasn’t read the room. Admitting that he’s “not the right person” to counter Vanga because “I’ll always support him” and that he “may get a lot of flak” for his response to Rashmika’s marriage proposal, Vijay is quite aware of his rowdy-boy reputation. But the issue is that he prefers to thrive on it, instead of making amends.The response, “Ask me a hundred times”, to his potential wife’s proposal isn’t problematic, given Vijay’s explanation. Confessing he is overtly “sensitive” and borderline commitment-phobe, he just wanted both him and Rashmika to sit with that feeling for a year to assess if they continue to feel the same way. Fair. But claiming he felt ready for marriage only after realising “she loves me” and “she makes me happy” sounds to us like how the entitled, self-obsessed Arjun Reddy felt cheated when his love wasn’t reciprocated. Vijay put Rashmika’s love to the test by asking her to wait it out for a year without any promise in return. But now that she’s passed the test, can we not hear him say what makes her special in the first place? Can you at least acknowledge how her love is different from all the other girls objectifying you as cheese on a platter? But no, like Arjun Reddy, Vijay makes his woman’s love all about himself.Can we get an AI chatbot to check compatibility next?In Balaji Mohan’s recent Tamil romantic show #Love on Netflix India, Artificial Intelligence is used to calculate compatibility on a dating app, but the counterargument is that it can’t calculate the chemistry. Similarly, an AI chatbot has been introduced in the latest Koffee with Karan episode to judge the winner. Karan argued that had the decision been left to him, he’d have picked Rashmika as the winner. But the AI bot chose Vijay because of his objective answers — “Specificity wins the hampers.”Story continues below this adIf that’s the prompt, Vijay was certainly more specific than Rashmika, but that doesn’t change the fact that both were diplomatic. If you rewind to when another newly married couple — Shahid Kapoor and Mira Rajput — shared the Koffee couch on season 5 back in 2017, Karan demanded a blow-by-blow account of their arranged marriage setup, right up to when exactly they fell in love during Mira’s first pregnancy. He cross-quizzed his guests, including Mira, who was very new to the showbiz back then, till they blurted out harsh truths during the Rapid Fire. Karan didn’t even mind telling Mira — who was also quite to-the-point and “specific” — she won the hamper only as a consolation for making her Koffee debut, instead of actually winning it over Shahid, who was more of a brazen sport, like that couch requires you to be.Also Read: Actor says she went from lead heroine to a cameo after refusing to serve director foodThe problem seems to be that if the AI chatbot has been fed the slumping graph of Koffee with Karan over the recent seasons as its primary prompt, it’ll surely merit specificity instead of cheekiness or candour. The bar is so low that hampers are being won by performing the bare minimum. If you really need to incorporate AI into the show and avoid the risk of putting the host on the spot, why not use it to serve the purpose of the infamous Lie-O-Meter? For that matter, ask any chatbot if Vijay and Rashmika pass the compatibility test on their episode, especially after that proposal story, and it’d tell you (if it has enough of a personality) — “If Vijay Deverakonda is cheese, one would rather be lactose intolerant.”‘Roast of the Week’ is a weekly column for the Koffee with Karan nerd community who love to dissect and decode every episode in great detail. Watch this space after every episode!