Criminal Justice Is Pankaj Tripathi’s Show All The Way

Criminal  Justice: Adhura Sach  (Disney+Hotstar)

Starring Pankaj Tripathi, Shweta Basu Prasad  , Purab Kohli, Swastika Mukherjee

Directed by Rohan Sippy

Rating: *** ½

“Juvenile cases make me uneasy,” confesses  cop Gauri Karmakar(Kalyani Mulay) to her senior as  they stroll to the  scene of  the crime where a 12-going-on-10 year old girl has been murdered.

Gauri,if you remember, had marital  issues with her husband in  the second season. Men in Criminal  justice  don’t like their women working.  Our lawyer-hero Madhav Mishra can barely  tolerate his wife’s ambitions as  a beautician.

Luckily  , Criminal  Justice: Adhura Sach doesn’t get into gruesome details of  the crime. This is  not  to say that proceedings  are  conducted on a  superficial level.  The  astutely  conceived  story  is intriguing: the whole culture of pushing  a juvenile  star into premature stardom , and not allowing Zara(Deshna  Dugad) to grow any older than 10  as that’s the  age  of her  cult character Bittu in a long-running serial, reminded me   of Avika  Gore  in  Balika  Badhu.

This one is another  kind  of gore. Writer  Bijesh Jayarjan  succeds in not steering the  plot into a bore. I haven’t seen  how  the whodunit pans  out(what is  the rationale  behind streaming  only one  episode  at  a time?) but so far , so  clenched.

 However be  warned:  our beloved underdog attorney  Madhav Mishra(Pankaj Tripathi)  makes an appearance  only in the middle  of the second episode. Madhav is still trying to  come to terms with the  presence  of his wife(played by Khushboo Atre) in his life. The  best dialogue of this season comes from Madhav’s wife: “Please don’t mumble  under your breath. You don’t look sexy.”

Touche.

Criminal Justice  never falls short of expectations. There is an admirable fluidity in the storytelling. Season 3 of Criminal  Justice doesn’t  dither in its dramatic  progression.  Written  in a rapidly moving stream of  crime-centric   consciousness, the  series, like its lawyer  hero Madhav Mishra,  never  judges  its characters  although  the show is  all about judgement and justice.