Applause Entertainment’s Criminal Justice 4, Leaves A Stronger Impact Than Aamir’s Sitaare Zameen Par

 Two eagerly awaited trailers  hit the  internet  on May 14.  While Aamir’s drunken-basketball-coach-gets-a-stab-at-redemption act in  Sitaare Zameen Par  seems  passably  interesting, Applause Entertainment’s  Criminal Justice seems to get better  more gripping with each season.

The  trailer  of Season 4 leaves us  gasping for breath: yes, it is  so tightly knit and the  presentation within the  given format of  fleeting glances , is   formidably   taut.

Pankaj Tripathi  wallows in the smug sameness  of the defence  lawyer Madhav Mishra’s characterization . But it is his  adversary Mita Vashisht whose  screen  presence  never  fails to  create a  riveting  impact.

Applause  Entertainment deserves  a  round  of applause  for going into Season 4  of their legal drama   without fumbling over the plotting  characterization or  , most crucially, the red herrings . I must say Pankaj Tripathi grows organically into his  lawyer’s role  with very season. He  imparts  a refreshing casualness, not to  be mistaken for nonchalance,  to his part.

So  how  does Season 4 of Criminal  Justice compare with the  first  three  seasons? Going by the  trailer,  I would say the new season  manages to   go beyond the other  seasons in the pursuit of  an engaging thriller perched on  the  legal  theme.

When the first season of Criminal  Justice had  come to  us in 2018, I was  hooked. This, despite having seen the BBC series of the same name and also the HBO film The Night Of in which Riz Ahmed played the cabbie who ends up in bed with a troubled female passenger and finds her dead next to him the next morning.

The always-interesting Vikrant Massey slipped into Riz Ahmed’s role, played by Ben Whishaw in the original BBC series. All three were   extraordinary in portraying the traumatized murder accused who is actually a victim. We already knew the plot. But we wanted  to see how the adaptation had moved away from the original BBC series and the HBO mini-series.

Three seasons  on ,at the  cusp of Season 4, Criminal Justice :  A Family Matter  doesn’t seem to  fall short of expectations. How  can it, when  the  redoubtable Mohhamed Zeeshan Ayyub stands accused  of murder. There has to be more to this  crime than meets the  eye.