‘Perfect Family’ Series Review: A Therapeutic, Well-Acted Portrait of Dysfunctional Familyhood

If you’ve watched enough modern Hindi socials over the years, chances are you’re well-acquainted with its red flags. Especially if the themes sound like hashtags: #DysfunctionalFamily, #Therapy, #MentalHealth, #NobodyIsPerfect, #SeekHelp. The preachiness aside, the stories are often designed to offer solutions to everything short of death (or sometimes even that). If not solutions, then righteous advice at the very least. It’s why I both loved and hated Dil Dhadakne Do (and a show like Made In Heaven); the staging of dysfunctionality and cultural quirks are the fun parts, but there’s always a sense that nothing is beyond repair. Every ‘condition’ is curable. The great thing about Perfect Family is that, over 8 fairly long episodes, it puts itself in a position to humanise the hashtags more than feature-length movies do. Its imperfections have character, and even if the intent is tethered to a message of change and higher wisdom, the show feels like more of a journey than a destination. Which is precisely the anatomy of being “fixed” these days; it’s a process with no beginning and ending.

So imagine Dil Dhadakne Do, but this Delhi family (also the Mehras) is upper middle-class, not on a European cruise, and the dog offering Aamir Khan-voiced life lessons is an actual therapist. For starters, the series hits the ground running. The in-point is that there’s no in-point. It opens with an escalating argument in a household: family members taunting, yelling, talking over each other, storming in and out. The equations are established through chaos and resentment, the default ‘mode’ in most homes that tends to be hidden away from society: the tipsy family patriarch (Manoj Pahwa) scoffing at his adult son for wanting to move away, the bitter mother (Seema Pahwa) adding fuel to his fire, the son (Gulshan Devaiah) being spineless and defensive, the daughter-in-law (Girija Oak Godbole) speaking for her husband, and the soon-to-be-divorced daughter (Kaveri Seth) catching strays. The camera follows every voice and no voice. Amidst this, there’s a little girl (Hirva Trivedi) who feels like a reluctant soldier dodging bullets from all directions; all she can do is look, be shaken and hear the sounds of bedroom doors shutting in disgust. Her trauma is building; she was the camera all along. When you start a series in this manner, from the perspective of a child (and not, say, the intellectual family pet), the stakes are already high. Any kind of simplification after this doesn’t feel like sugarcoating; it’s the hidden story of millions of Indian families, where the lack of subtlety is a necessary language of its own.

When the little girl lashes out in school, the big fat Indian family is sent to a psychiatrist (Neha Dhupia) and behave like buffoons there — until they don’t. Much of the show revolves around the juxtaposition of their formal sessions — one-on-ones as well as different permutations and combinations (the three women together, the two men together) — with the messy truth of their everyday problems. Admittedly, some of the show’s weaker moments revolve around these readymade exposition exchanges. Even though therapy legitimises the narrative act of imparting advice, most of these scenes are a bit too curated, almost fourth-wall-breaking in their words and actions. But the broader strokes of the show are more perceptive: its reading of marriage, parenthood, microaggressions, ideological conflicts, internalised gender dynamics, and the lies we tell ourselves to accept flawed relationships.

Take each of the characters in the household. On the surface, they’re “labels” who’d be reduced to moral identities in most stories. But it’s not as simple here. The oldest Mehra, Somnath, is everything from an everyday bigot (he cringes when he hears the school counsellor’s Muslim name) to a closet alcoholic to a chauvinist to a traditional parent who throws money at issues. He’s not the most pleasant man to be around; at one point, he’s so drunk at a neighbour’s wedding that he ends up groping his own wife in public. Usually there’s no coming back for ‘characters’ who behave this way. But Perfect Family treats him, and the others, as full and multifaceted people without judging them. There is room for improvement, but the change is not abrupt; his idea of masculinity is not undone overnight. There is no redemption arc or trajectory of healing, just a lot of sharing and exploring how childhood trauma manifests into deeply entrenched human conditions. Their backstories don’t justify who they are, but they convey answers to questions that rarely surface. Some of the middle episodes detailing the past and the inheritance of patterns are flabby, particularly because the sessions spell out the meaning of every incident like it’s a guest lecture. But it’s the overall situations and traits that are astutely observed.

For instance, the little girl has a brother too, but this kid is least affected because he’s too busy internalising the coping mechanisms of his father and grandfather who use religion as a crutch themselves (he loves cosplaying as gods and yelling “Jai Sri Ram!,” or imitating his grandpa with a crass burp followed by a “Hari Om”). It’s always the girl who’s more sensitive and exposed to the environment without a shield. Her father, Vishnu, is a practicing Buddhist who breaks out into his chants the second he is stressed; he’s battling for a promotion in his company and struggling to be a good husband whose promise of a separate home rings hollow. But the darkness is not brushed under the carpet. He hates his female boss and, every time she insults him, he locks himself in the office washroom and jerks off to boss-secretary porn. His wife, Neeti, quit her career to be a mom but the lack of identity is crippling; her thighs are full of scars because she is addicted to the pain of cutting herself. The daughter, Preeti, carries herself like she believes she’s the stigma her parents treat her as — separated, childless, vying to run the male-dominated family business, and unresponsive to intimacy. Each of these people are the flawed protagonists of intersecting movies unfolding in the same space; the only time they’re in control of their narratives is on the couch in the therapist’s office. One of the more penetrative insights revolves around how the family members think they’re doing this for the child but end up often making it about themselves. In the process, she continues to fall through the cracks, and the series refuses to trace a road to an absolute future.

The cast is largely solid, given the fact that the source material itself could have been so didactic. The performances are the reason the inflated length of the episodes aren’t a deal breaker. Even when some of the scenes feel too staged — like when Preeti impresses a girl-boss client that her old-school father cannot win over; or when there’s a convenient father-daughter dance program; or a photography project meant to neaten the resolution (cue episode-ending voiceovers) — the actors tread that thin line between engagement and information. The chemistry between real-life couple Manoj and Seema Pahwa often breathes life into characters that threaten to unfold in binaries: either too regressive or too warm. Gulshan Devaiah does a fine job of turning Vishnu into an apple that hasn’t fallen far from the tree, even if he thinks otherwise. He has that weight-of-the-world-on-his-shoulders walk, where his discrepancies too feel like symptoms of victimhood.

Of everyone, though, it’s Girija Oak Godbole that steals the show as the “outsider” in the joint-family battlefield. She’s an elevated version of Priyamani’s Suchi from The Family Man. Neeti is like a ticking time-bomb whose explosions are always muffled by the science of companionship — there’s one showdown towards the end where the actor quakes, vents and spits truths like a homegrown Marriage Story character. As someone who’s grown up in a broken family, I found it hard to make eye-contact with the character, lest I see too much of my mother in her. It’s an extremely uncanny turn, which also brought to mind the rawness of Ribbon (2017), a new-age relationship drama starring Kalki and Sumeet Vyas. There’s not a moment where Neeti feels like a ‘written’ persona with predestined junctures of epiphanies and closure. If anything, she’s the humanity coursing through the veins of a template that’s almost too methodical to cut deep. Each of them is forced to confront themselves through the sessions, one by one, making for a bloated home stretch. But when you see ‘fictions’ like her, those red flags are revealed as clothes that have merely absorbed the blood of run-of-the-mill wounds. And those cool hashtags look like criss-crossing scars that we bury beneath those clothes.