Made In Heaven Season 2 Review — Sucharita Tyagi
Wedding celebrations are almost always a powder keg, kabhi bhi phatne ko taiyyar. Almost ALL of which is directly thanks to the people AROUND the bride and groom, alag ki saanp seedhi khel rahe hote hain rishtedaar.
Add in the most “main character syndrome” wedding planners ever, and you’ve got yourselves a hit tv series.
Desh ki sabse prasidh Hindi series ka season 2 is finally here, Made in Heaven, created by Zoya Akhtar, and Reema Kagti, written with Alankrita Shrivastava, and a wide range of writers Mansi Jain, Anil Lakhwani, Rahul Nair. Nitya Mehra, and Neeraj Ghaywan completing the slate of directors.
Not having revisited the previous season at all in the last 4 years, when I say I had little to no recollections of the cliffhangers. The show realizes the time and the pandemic-related upheavals we’ve gone through in the interim and is kind enough to provide a nearly 4-minute recap sequence. Hand on your heart, did you remember Vikrant Massey was on the show? Took me a while to reconnect with everyone, to remember Tara is just as manipulative as Adil, that Jazz has a brother struggling with addiction, Kabir is a f*ckboy, and that the show was Modern Love Delhi before any Indian Modern Love adaptations were a real thing.
Personifying the dire situation of their company, both Tara and Karan must also rise from the ashes of the lives they thought they were building, tasked with the impossible undertaking of….having hope. Picking up 6 months after the previous one ended, the writers make the choice to set everything pre-pandemic, maintaining a long distance from the global event that ensured businesses like wedding planning would be either forced to grapple with immense financial losses or shut down altogether, though I swear I saw Kabir moodily walk around under a Cannes Dance Festival 2021 poster in episode 4. It is a wise move id say to stay away from the whole covid affecting event planning companies unfairly, considering the weight of the many concerns the show already seems to have.
Straight up, in Episode 1 Nitya Mehra is entrusted with tackling khandaani colorism that comes out in full force during wedding season. A young girl feels the need to lighten her skin, even as the man she’s marrying, tries to convince her she’s attractive the way she is. In this episode in particular, all actors are “acting”, phoning it in to get to the point, settling on a story that’s neither novel nor as inspiring as it would like to be. Shaky start. The episode seems happy with reminding its viewers that fairness creams and treatments are bad, once that job is done, it becomes about Sabyasachi wedding couture, which while stunning and unparalleled, contributes little to what the episode is clearly trying to achieve — holding up a mirror to our faces, forcing us to accept biases and, pun not intended, unfairness. Sabyasachi himself makes many appearances, seemingly sharing a close friendship with Tara, but mostly serving looks. For real he has no business being this camera friendly. Both Arjun Mathur and Sobhita Dhulipala feel as unstable as the writing, the presence of Shashank Arora with his oddly timed and yet perfect dialogue delivery once again making everyone look like amateurs. THEN Jim Sarbh shows up, and the show finds its bearing again, but honestly when Mona Singh is introduced as Bulbul Jauhari at the end of this episode, was when I found my conviction in the show again.
Also, this one featured a woman who had the nerve to tell Sobhita Dhulipala she needed a skin treatment. As if.
As the series progressed, it became increasingly clear which side of it is going to be more fun to watch unfold this season — the episodic tales featuring actors like an EXCELLENT Mrunal Thakur, Diya Mirza, Pulkit Samrat playing Salman Khan and Ranveer Singh’s love child….vs the recurring Tara, Karan, Jazz, Kabir etc.
Despite its best most honest intentions, the storylines written around the former can’t help but feel preachy, too on the nose like a 20-year-old trying to make it as an activist.
Of the backstage conflicts going on with the people running the business, that of Mona Singh as Bulbul Jauhari has the clearest demarcation between the darkness of real life and the make-believe world wedding planners create for their clients. In this sub-plot the show looks at the horror of raising teenage boys in the technology-ridden world we know today. Matched with Vijay Raaz, Mona Singh is a sheer force on screen, everyone else’s conflicts just pale around Bulbul, a woman with the name of a bird, who had to regrow her wings.
In fact, season two excels most brilliantly with the two new additions to the main cast, the second being Dr. Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju as Production Coordinator Meher. She’s a woman at work, charging top money for her services, sharp as a tack, but also swiping on dating apps every opportunity she gets, every location she travels to, always ready to explain herself, her life as a trans woman, before a man has the opportunity to hurt her. After the release of 2018’s Kaalaakandi, screenwriter Gazal Dhaliwal pointed out that we must start asking for trans characters who aren’t just included in movies to play “the other”. How Meher’s inclusion in the main cast, not just a subject in an episode to be pondered over, will positively impact conversations around trans inclusion and representation, remains to be seen, but even since Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, this is a solid, defiant foot forward.
Neeraj Ghaywan steps in to direct two episodes, and thanks to one of these, you realize you’ve probably never seen a Buddhist ceremony, a Dalit wedding, happen in Hindi popular culture, with aplomb and celebration. Sab customs dekhey hain, mundane se lekar harr tarah ka havan, shaadi, arthi, par ek aurat kahe ki Dalit traditions se shaadi hogi, might be a first, in a production of this scale. Yes, we still are at a place where THIS is the conflict, some people refusing to attend a Dalit ceremony, others forced to hide their caste identity, but aren’t we also still here only as a nation, the show asks.
This season is very watchable once it finds its bearing. Real-life husband and wife Samir Soni and Neelam appear as twosome cheating on their respective married partners with each other, while in another episode Pulkit Samrat tells a filmmaker, ki real-life couples don’t sell on screen. Props here once again to casting director Nandini Srikent for finding exceedingly watchable actors. Pairing Sheetal Menon with Mukul Chaddha, Sarah Jane Dias, Elnaaz Norouzi, and Ishwaq Singh. Mohammed Muneem singing at a wedding, I THINK I spotted a surprise Renuka Shahane at one point, the show is carefully and lovingly sprinkled with decorations, the way you would a real wedding. Shivani Raghuwanshi dancing and telling Shashank Arora “tu har baat ko aise depressing kaise banaa dete ho? Meri beauty pe focus karo!” only in a way Jazz would, make my day.
Not to sound like a broken record, but the only time the show broke me, in a good way, is when Bulbul tells her son the truth about his father. Actor Mihir Ahuja who plays her teenage son gives this scene everything he has and more, the two of them breaking through the screen and into my mind in a way frankly no other characters managed to do this season. Bulbul and her defiant son may be “types”, a teenager, a tired mother, but in this one moment of truth, as they go from agony to release very quickly, the show takes a beat and allows them to become the heart of this season, the way Jazz did last time.
Kabir ke overtly strained intellectual voiceovers ki tarah, har episode apne mudde ke under zara burdened mehsoos hua iss baar. Itna ki end taka aate aate ek bride apne liye hi vows leti dikhi, “I promise to love and honor myself” which while the sentiment is lovely, didn’t make for a riveting finale. Nearly every single couple, in every single wedding, being planned is ill-adjusted, not just with each other, but as people in general, character development probably arrives from an attempt to write relatable flawed humans and yet the struggle to not seem like it is trying too hard, is also ever so slightly visible, most pronounced in another sub-plot in the last episode, with another character deciding to take on the government and file a petition to change a law directly impacting their personal romantic relationship.
More power.
