To watch or not to watch: Definite watch for the jaded

Starring: Sobhita Dhulipala, Arjun Mathur, Jim Sarbh, Shivani Raghuvanshi, Kalki Koechlin, Shashank Arora

Tara and Karan are wedding planners at Made in Heaven. It is a new endeavour for both. Tara has to prove to the world that she isn’t gold-digger and Karan wants to be a success after the failure of his night club. They both have a lot riding on this new business and it shows by the effort they put into their clients’ wedding preparations, going beyond the call of duty.

Behind the glitter of the expensive weddings, all the members of Made in Heaven have their own personal hell to deal with. Karan is gay in a country which casts taboo on it. Tara has risen in life by marriage to the industrialist Adil (Jim Sarbh) who is mostly an absentee husband.

Things aren’t always black and white for the duo. They have to do whatever it takes to make the weddings happen. And in one case, not happen, all the while dealing with behind the scenes stuff that go into running a start-up

Each episode of the series deals with one aspect of the marriage scenario, like an anthology, with the personal lives of the protagonists being the continuous story in the background.

The series is critically well made, seamlessly dealing with the societal issues in the country, not giving goody-two-shoes solutions to them. It is a very real look at our society and how the women and homosexuals are wrongly treated, getting more respect and acceptance than a molester. There are episodes with weddings where parents want a “pure” daughter-in-law; then a bride who cheats and lies to get married; a groom who wants dowry – all the while the wedding planners swoop in to save the day.
While Kalki Koechlin and Jim Sarbh are constant in the series, there are some stellar performances delivered by Neena Gupta, as a concerned mother, Deepti Naval as an elder bride, Shweta Tripathi as a bride with hidden strength.

It is refreshing to see something this norm defying by the Hindi media, specially as an original from Amazon Prime. This is completely out of the box – some moments where direction was the show stopper some where the sheer performance stole the show. This series is not for the faint of the heart; it needs an open mind and a big heart.