Made In Heaven , The Second Season Is Worth The Wait

Made In Heaven , Season 2(Prime  Video, 7 Episodes)

Rating: ****

First, the  comfort of the familiar. Adil Khanna is still cheating on his wife.Jaspreet ‘Jazz’  Kaur is still  stealing fucks from a ground level  worker. Tara Khanna is  still grey.And yes, Arjun Mathur is still  gay.

So how  to spice up the status quo? Four years after Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti whipped up a foamy but powerful series on two wedding planners, one on the verge  of a divorce, the  other happily gay, the entire cast of emotionally compromised characters is back, this time  doing nothing that we haven’t already seen them doing.

The new characters are interesting only if you  examine their underbelly to see how stylishly they  break the rules.Trinetra  Haldar, a real-life trans-gender joins the  cast as Meher, who we are  led to believe,was a part of  the Made-in-Heavan(wouldn’t  Made-in-Havan  be more germane to the theme?) team at some point.

Meher is sloppily introduced to the plot with a  ‘Arrey tum  kab aye’ kind of  awkward introduction. She  is  soon doing everything that tans-characters do in cinema, like getting violated by a creepy  man when  he discovers she has avagina instead  of  a penis.

Problems, problems, I tell you.  The characters here are burdened with  huge problems like: which wedding dress suits a dark-complexioned girl and what is the purpose of  pink champagne at  a wedding.

What makes all of this trivia tolerable is the characters’ selfawareness.

They get  it. The life they  lead does not define the  world that exists  beyond planned destination weddings , or if you want to be more Mumbai-specific, beyond Bandra.

“When  did we become poor?” Tara(Sobhita Dhulipala), who lives with the inherent  irony of being a wedding planner whose own marriage is on the rocks,  asks  her colleague and flatmate Karan(Arjun Mathur). This ,I thought was the funniest line  in the 7 hour-plus viewing experience  of  Season 2(why stretch what can be told in 4-5 episodes to  7?) .

For those out there craving  to know what’s  new this time around,crave no more. There is the talented  Ishwak Singh as a chef in a restaurant imaginatively know  as ‘The Kitchen’ who is interested in Tara who is going through the messiest divorce since Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott.

Tara wants  half her husband’s business empire.

Adil Khanna(Jim Sarbh) is aghast. “Why the fuck should I give you half my business? My father built it brick by brick.”

I think Adil has a point, a  point of no returns, one may call it.

Everyone sees relationships in this series as an  investment. Everyone seems to be getting married for the wrong reasons. In the weakest episode directed by the brilliant Neeraj Ghaiwan)  Neelam  who is married to Sanjay Kapoor(our sympathies)  loves Sameer Soni who is married to a lovely woman who has the  best moment in the series after her husband elopes with her daughter’s future father-in-law.

No,  it is not as  complicated as  it sounds. These are people who like to create their own problems  since  they have  nothing really important to  worry about. My favourite character this season is Mona Singh as  the new auditor who is brought in to  make the numbers add up for the wedding planners. Quite like  Mona Singh who  is  roped in to liven up the series.

Not that Made In  Heaven  2 is  lacking in areas of interest. The  characters, though insulated from reality, are  ceaselessly sassy. And they are always surprising us with their capacity to plummet to new lows of  immorality.