CAST: Shriya Pilgaonkar, Varun Mitra, Karishma Tanna, Sugandha Garg. Pranay Pachauri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Deepak kalra, Satish Kaushik, Namrata Sheth.Shakti Kapoor, Benjamin Gilani

DIRECTED BY Shefali Bhushan and Jayant Digambar Somalkar

BLUF:  Shriya Pilgaonkar plays Kashaf Quaze, who with her partner Vandana Kathpalia aka Vandu (Sugandha Garg), takes up cases on behalf of the meek. Up against these feisty ladies is the very smart Deepak Rana (Varun Mitra), an outsider who has made a mark for himself in a reputed family-run law firm, headed by the formidable ‘Your Honour’ L N Khanna (Kulbhushan Kharbanda). The younger Khannas comprising brother-sister duo Shubhrat and Shubhangi (Pranay Pachauri and Namrata Sheth) are determined to create a niche for themselves. Benjamin Gilani, nearly unrecognisable, shows up as a morally upright judge who has to deal with a blot on his escutcheon. Satish Kaushik is present as a dodgy, loud self-made businessman who runs a ‘sharaab ka dhanda’ : Deepak Kalra plays his son, a coarse, carelessly good-natured coke-snorter, with the swag of a very specific Delhi species, a guy able to carry off printed twin-sets and man-buns, and demand : ‘momos, mayo ke saath’.

With this series,  Indian writers finally prove they can write spunky intelligent scripts too. 

IN THE KNOW

First and foremost, fun to finally watch realistic lawsuits of day, time and age of our times where law is behind technology, challenged by it and the lawyers are real people effected by the consequences of the facts, realities and the lives outside the courtrooms.

Impeccable casting in picking up Shriya Pilgaonkar as the idealistic lawyer Kashaf Quaze who is the daughter of a Stand-up supreme Court judge fighting her own demons and her outspoken partner and Vandana (Sugandha Garg)., Varun Mitra as the upstart lawyer Deepak Rana, who has made his way up the ladder of success in a family run law firm controlled by the patriarch Khanna ( Kulbhushan Kharbanda) and his children who are all lawyers especially the grandchildren Shubrat and Shubhangi ( our favorite perennial hottie Pranay Pachauri and  Namrata Sheth)- all competiting with each other to be relevant and winning.

The entire ensemble of actors is extremely august –  Benjamin Gilani, Satish Kaushik is present as a dodgy, loud self-made businessman, Deepak Kalra as a typical Delhi loud caricature, Shakti Kapoor ( as a music director in a very interesting music algorithm plagiarism case).

The feisty ladies win and lose. Deepak makes enemies as an outsider in a family owned business but what does not falter in this extremely well written 10 episode series is the quality of the writing, the legal premise, the logic, the acting and the execution of each damn episode.

All 10 episodes have different themes and cases. Set in Delhi, with cases intermittently set up in Mumbai, the series is all desi, very real and extremely thought provoking.

Shefali Bhushan, the show’s writer and co-director comes from a family of attorneys. Her father Shanti Bhushan, a veteran lawyer, was the former law minister of India, and her brother is activist and lawyer Prashant Bhushan. It wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to trace the origins of the show to Bhushan’s family life and the reason why the plots are so legally so sound.

All bellowing verbal duels and multicolored sermons between rival lawyers, and sparring presiding judges that we’ve seen in so many of our mainstream movies are replaced by matter-of-fact cross-examination of witnesses, or a straight-forward presentation of facts.

So there is no Gita par haath and no Mi Lord and absolutely no theatrics and we are so relieved to find this content and we cannot stop dancing with joy.

By the way, a side note- that entire scene with Alexa interjecting herself into a conversation of people is so real that it had our Alexa in squeals. Thanks Amazon.

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