'Good Wife' Series Review: This Priyamani Drama Is A Strictly Functional Iteration

There are a handful of moments within Good Wife when it becomes a little more than a pedestrian rehash of the show’s original American version. In these rare occasions, you begin to feel for Tarunika (Priyamani) and the dozen issues she has to deal with after her corrupt husband Guna (Sampath) gets sent to jail. On one side, she has to deal with the embarrassment of the whole world gossiping about her husband’s alleged affairs. She has to figure out a way to run her household, too, after the court orders for all the bank accounts to be frozen. Their two children, still in high school, have to negotiate a torrid time when other classmates begin to talk about their dad and his fall from grace. And now imagine starting over in your career, having to climb the corporate ladder at a law firm, which, coincidentally, is being run by her old college flame.

The premise, almost exactly that of the original’s first season, is ripe with dramatic possibilities. It’s clever enough to be seen as a collection of Taruni’s internal battles as she takes on the world to keep her dysfunctional family afloat. It’s also light enough to be seen simply as an inoffensive soap opera with something scandalous thrown at you with every cliffhanger.

Priyamani in a still from 'Good Wife'

But where Good Wife becomes difficult to complete is when you realise how little has been done in the name of an adaptation. Dialogues are either too explanatory to sound natural or they’re too robotic to sound human. In some cases, they sound like placeholders used on the first draft, expecting either the actors or the director to rework them while it’s being shot. Just when a scene begins, chances are, you will be able to ad-lib the entire dialogue, without losing any essence of the script or the character.

The same can be said about how it’s transplanted into a Chennai setting. The show goes overboard with drone shots of the many Chennai city landmarks, lest we forget where the story is taking place. The actors, too, have nothing much to do except go about their dialogues with perfunctory expressions, without being able to make us feel what they’re feeling. So, imagine feeling nothing, even when you see Taruni attend a phone call where she’s being told that her daughter may have attempted suicide. 

But even this bit of detail is used merely for shock. Never again is such an important matter discussed. In another throwaway line, we’re told that Taruni’s son suffers from anger issues because of what’s happening at home. Apart from the one reference to this at the start and a dialogue that comes later, this, too, seems like an afterthought to add a tablespoon of misery to Taruni’s already miserable life.

The rest of it feels functional and nothing more. We get thrown right into the middle of a courtroom sequence in every episode, and yet we learn little about each case to the point where none of it matters. Names like Meth Maharaja, apparently a drug kingpin, is thrown around so matter-of-factly that you double-check the subtitles to see if you’re hearing wrong. It’s not that the show couldn’t have worked. But in its present state, Good Wife is neither intense enough to be taken seriously, nor is it trashy enough to be watched on the sly as you try to finish washing your dishes.