Rahul Desai
Arunima Sharma’s Jee Karda starring Tamannaah Bhatia, Suhail Nayyar, Aashim Gulati, Anya Singh and more is an eight-episode series about seven childhood friends in Mumbai.
It’s about school friends who remain inseparable till their 30s – a sitcom-style luxury I’ve always envied, given the inherent human ability to grow apart and move on. It’s also a fruity, lightweight story in a year of bleak socio-political thrillers and dramatic adaptations.
If it isn’t clear already, my desire to enjoy Jee Karda remained just that: A desire. The tricky part about such shows is that it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint where they go wrong. There is no single reason. No single department is visibly poor.
Jee Karda tries too hard to defy the traditions of Hindi storytelling, and therefore comes across as aggressively hip and showy. It doesn’t mine the ironies of urban living so much as flaunt them.
In the age of Succession and School of Lies – where verbal jousts and deep-rooted trauma become set pieces of their own – Jee Karda stands out like a sore thumb.