Jee Karda: Amazon’s Breezy Coming-Of-Age Hope Opera

Jee Karda(Prime Video, 8 episodes)

Rating: *** ½

Have you ever been to a  wedding where, right  in the middle of the festivities,  the lights  go off? That’s how it felt at the end of  Jee Karda. A wedding, the  photogenic Tamannaah Bhatia’s wedding, had just taken place and  she was figuring out  whether she  was  fit for spousedom or not(my verdict: no, she is  not, not after her nasty behaviour  in the middle of  the wedding festivities)  when the  serial ended abruptly, hoping to keep us hooked  until the next season.

 While some  of the characters  do have potential to hop and skip  into a second season, others are  just plain  human embodiments of  animalisticselfindulgence. They  do what they like. They treat their  partners  like disposable diapers, or even worse , like used condoms.

And though the seven friends played by  Tamannaah Bhatia, Aashim Gulati, Suhail Nayyar, Anya Singh, Hussain Dalal, Sayan Banerjee, and Samvedna Suwalka , speak endlessly about commitment and honesty  in relationships,they seem  trapped  in a writers’ block.

The writing by Abbas and  Hussain Dalaal  and director Arunima Sharma,  seems way too  eager to expel  urban coolth  on the characters . They end up looking like they are showering under water sprinklers  that don’t work  properly.

  While they are  all very  ‘cool’ in their sexual frankness(when a husband asks his wife to come in the bathroom  for sex she recommends masturbation)  they  almost invariably  end up looking  acutely aspirational with their I-suttenly-hop-saw accents  and  I-don’t-give-a-frock  attitude.

Only Samvedna Suwalka’s Sheetal and her problems feel real. But her no-space-for-sex predicament feels strongly déjà vu:  we recently saw  it in Zara  Hatke  Zara Bachke.Nonetheless Sheetal comes across as a real person rather than a facsimile.

Some  characters are clearly overloaded. Melroy(Sayan Banerjee) was abused  by his father, is  gay and  trapped in an  abusive  relationship with closeted  man who  drops in every weekend.

And not to play ludo.Oh hell, no.

As for the two male leads  Aashim Gulati and Suhail Nayyar are  the two bratty brothers  from different mothers. One of them  ends up with godman Anup Jalota(in a fleeting television appearance) as  his illegitimate  father…you get the overloaded picture?

Aashim’s rapper-boy hedonism as  Arjun seems like  a  corny carryover  from his other recent series where he played Prince Salim.Arjun  is just as selfindulgent and  hedonistic. In one of the series’ most ineffective humour attempts, a concierge at a hotel hides in his room  and  makes him sing while she seems be to be having an orgasms.

This series confuses libidinous  selfindulgence with sexual frankness. The talented Anya Singh deserved better than to be squeezed under a brainless Bollywood star who accuses her of dumping him after his  latest film flops.

I  get the  temporal fast-food mood  of  the series. But really, did everything have to be so  obvious? Nonetheless it is  a fun slip-in-slip-out  watch.