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‘Criminal Justice: A Family Matter’ Series Review: Too Much Chatter, Not Enough Matter
The fourth season of the crime drama sacrifices aesthetics at the altar of dime-store entertainment.
Director: Rohan Sippy
Writers: Harman Wadala, Sandeep Jain, Sameer Mishra, Rahul Ved Prakash, Varsha Ramachandran, Riya Poojary
Cast: Pankaj Tripathi, Surveen Chawla, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Asha Negi, Shweta Basu Prasad, Khushi Bhardwaj, Khushboo Atre, Barkha Singh, Kalyanee Mulay, Mita Vashishth
Streaming on: JioHotstar
Language: Hindi
The crime scene: an upscale Bandra apartment. The crime: famous surgeon Raj Nagpal (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) is found holding the dead body of his girlfriend, Roshni Saluja (Asha Negi). The social angle: the person who finds Raj in this position is none other than his separated wife, Anju (Surveen Chawla), who lives next door. The dysfunctional-family quirk: Roshni was the nurse and caregiver of Raj and Anju’s neurodivergent 13-year-old daughter (Khushi Bhardwaj). The lawyer(s): working-class hero Madhav Mishra (Pankaj Tripathi) defends prime suspect Raj against old foe and public prosecutor Lekha Agastya (Shweta Basu Prasad). Other characters who may or may not matter: a shaken housemaid, two police investigators (also a divorced couple), Roshni’s ex-boyfriend, Raj’s bitchy friends, Anju’s jaded face, and the public spat that Raj and Roshni had at the daughter’s birthday party the night before.
For a moment, let’s look past the long-time flaws of this franchise. Let’s look past the simplistic television-plus tone of the franchise, the background score that seems to have originated on a ‘90s digital piano and flute, the dumbed-down version of suspense, the unadventurous craft, the women-written-by-men syndrome, the abrupt transitions between ‘comic relief’ scenes and the case, the over-the-top acting, the episodes that seem reverse-engineered into existence from their cliffhangers, the commercial need to be 8 episodes long despite having 4 episodes worth of material, Madhav Mishra playing Pankaj Tripathi, the verbose courtroom arguments, and the B-movie treatment.
That’s a lot to look past, I know, but perhaps it’s time to change the goalposts for mainstream Hindi cinema. We must start from a position of assuming that being clumsy (and accessible) is what many productions are going for. Even if they’re not. It’s an extension of the “judge it for what it is, not what it can be” and “leave your brains at home” argument — a sort of “leave your aesthetics at home” state of mind. Mediocrity is the only ambition, and maybe it’s time to look for nuance in mediocrity. By this yardstick, Criminal Justice: A Family Matter has the most interesting setup of the four seasons.
As is often the case, the plot is a tool to put society itself on the stand. The themes are more urgent here. On trial is our relationship with power, privilege, masculinity, marriage, parenthood, social prejudice, and a modern eat-the-rich vibe. Everyone — the cops, the househelp, the victim’s friend and mother, the media channels, even the lawyers — is inherently prejudiced against the Nagpal family. The investigating officers, in particular, sound like they’re in a reddit gossip group that chases every rumour they hear; they can’t help but scoff at the kinks of the rich and famous. The confirmation biases are strong. The unsaid belief is that they’re too ‘wealthy’ to be innocent. Apathy trumps empathy: Lekha, the opposing counsel, is in it not for Roshni or bleeding-heart justice but to avenge a previous defeat to Madhav and teach his ‘immoral’ client a lesson. Ego drives her. Never mind the mechanical “we want justice!” chants on loop outside the court every morning that sound like they’ve been recorded in an echoey college mess.
The intent is clearly to subvert a narrative that’s rigged against Raj and his likes. Even his mistakes are not mistakes: his ‘affair’ with Roshni didn’t involve any infidelity because it started after his marriage was over. It wasn’t something he hid. His greyness is sterilised. In prison, too, he saves an inmate from an appendix burst. He’s a loving father and a caring ex-partner. But this humanisation of one-percenters slowly morphs into the whitewashing of privilege itself. It’s a thin line, and the revelation in the end crosses it with a blurring of moral boundaries between victims and offenders. The indictment of class discrimination turns into a cautionary tale about class rage. What could’ve been a twisted riff on Phantom Thread (2017) or, closer to home, Halahal (2020) — where people are perceived as victims by virtue of being dead — becomes a copout that validates the entitlement of the accused.
It’s an attention-seeking climax, especially because much of the series is designed to make us stop caring about who did it. After all, “the butler did it” means more than a detective trope; in India it alludes to preconceived notions about outsiders who resent the lives of those they work for. It also says something that the complexities of being human are only reserved for the Nagpals. The others who are lower on the ladder are reduced to types. Inserts of Madhav Mishra’s personal life — his polite infantilization of his younger wife; his banter with his brother-in-law; his chaste humour in chaste Hindi — keeps puncturing the tension of the case. Early on, he walks out of a plum retainer deal with a pharma firm because they want him to retain his “aam aadmi (common man)” image instead of accepting big criminal cases. He does all of this with the grin of a Cheshire cat. Tripathi on autopilot is still better to watch than most, but there’s a growing sense that he’s happy to fit in with the bare-minimum style of storytelling.
The cop, Gauri, has a strange and incomplete track with her ex-husband (who’s called to lead the case after she stumbles), because at no point do they seem like a divorced couple who’ve spent time apart. If anything, it often feels like he’s wooing her back. Mishra’s new associate (Barkha Singh) is a young upstart with a foreign education who opts to work for the humble underdog against the wishes of her snooty mother — another character from a previous season who thinks Mishra is a fluke, which, to be fair, is an accurate reading of a guy who cracks cases like he knows he’s cracking cases for those who’ve never watched a courtroom drama before. He has a silver tongue and a wry sense of humour, but his conscience looks like an accident rather than a choice.
The first four episodes are watchable because we learn about the involved faces in their homes, offices and private spaces. There’s more visual diversity — Roshni’s funeral, for example, is staged as a dramatic montage intercut with Raj’s first day in custody. The daughter, Ira, has Asperger’s but she behaves like she’s just an anxious introvert who can’t make eye contact; Bollywood’s fraught relationship with “conditions” continues. The viewer is encouraged to scrutinise the girl, the there-but-not-there grandma, a perverse garbageman, and Anju, to whom all the evidence starts to point. Surveen Chawla is the only actor to come out of the series with distinction. Her depiction of Anju has an emotional intelligence and vulnerability that’s unusual to see in roles that are meant to be ambiguous.
She brings to mind Sushmita Sen’s performance as an embattled mother and wife in the first season of Aarya. When she appears, one is even willing to forgive the lazy film-making — like a suspect who is revealed to be left-handed because he raises his left hand to protect himself from a slap (really?), or secret exchanges being drowned out by music or silence in the middle of an incriminating sentence (“I have to tell you something…” and the voices fade out). Or lactose intolerance appearing as a plot point once an associate drinks milk out of the blue. Or even the flashback of the incident being conveniently parcelled into memories like a puzzle waiting — begging — to be solved.
But not even Chawla can spice up the next four episodes, which are almost entirely based in the drab courtroom full of interrogations, accusations, speeches and grandstanding. When she is asked to describe her marriage, she responds with a funny analogy: “Like the average Bollywood film: the first half was exciting, but the second half was unbearable”. Irony goes to jail. I’m fond of the genre, but Criminal Justice bides time like a goalkeeper theatrically holding the ball to his chest to run the clock down. There are not two but three lawyers in these portions, and the ever-expanding screenplay struggles to juggle so many moving pieces. It’s also not mature enough to explore the themes it introduces, not least because the franchise unfolds like a brand at odds with its own commentary. If the gimmick is to present any high-profile case like a reality series, it’s hard to tell the smokescreen from the screen.
To put things into perspective, Criminal Justice: A Family Matter takes more than 7 hours to do what a single 35-minute episode of Guilty Minds (2022) — the smartest Indian legal drama in recent memory — did. So it might come as no surprise that Guilty Minds was recently cancelled after its first season, while the immensely popular Criminal Justice could have at least 20 more seasons by 2050. It began as an adaptation of a BBC series, but it now has a fertile OTT life of its own: timeless, endless and guileless. It treats entertainment as the antithesis of art, like several shows that fail to fathom how entertainment is a language of art. That said, I’ll watch the next installment, because the two-hour setup will paint a picture of what could have been if I didn’t leave my aesthetics — and raging mind — at home. The music should’ve drowned out the crucial bits of this review, but there is no (criminal) justice in this world.