This legal drama has obviously been made to give Kajol a headlining role, since the work she has done for OTT so far has been ordinary. The way things are in the web series production world right now, it is easiest to adapt a foreign show, so The Trial, with its cheesy tagline Pyaar Kaanoon Dhoka, is the Indian version of The Good Wife, created and directed by Suparn S. Verma. As far as picking a role worthy of Kajol goes—in the show produced by her husband Ajay Devgn– the original did have a terrific part for the female lead. The popular, award-winning series ran for seven seasons and had a spin-off series, The Good Fight, that ran for six. However, it is not enough to simply take an idea and transplant it to another country and culture; the American legal system is quite different from the Indian, so it would take a lot of effort and research to make the plotlines work here.
To begin with, cases in India go on for years. In the US, the district and state attorneys are elected posts, so have a lot more prestige than judges in India. Like the original, The Trial begins well— Noyonika Sengupta’s (Kajol) life is upended when her husband Rajiv (Jisshu Sengupta), an additional judge, is arrested for a sex-as-bribe scandal. He was caught in flagrante delicto by hidden camera, and the clip flaunted on TV by sensation-mongering host Daksh Rathore (Atul Kumar). yet, behaves throughout the show like a wronged innocent. His accounts are frozen, and privileges revoked.
Noyonika and her two teenage daughters are not just humiliated, but have to leave their lavish home. Their struggle does not really come through, because the apartment they move into is swanky by any standard, but palatial for Mumbai. After a lot of rejections, she gets the job of junior lawyer at the firm run by her college boyfriend Vishal Chaubey (Alyy Khan) and his wry partner Malini Khanna (resplendent in Bengali saris), for which she has to compete, after a six-month probation, with the ambitious Dheeraj Paswan (Gaurav Pandey) who resents her nepotism hire.
Noyonika still drives a sedan – the Merc she had to sell!—and has a vast wardrobe of suits and designer bags, but does not have money to pay the kids’ school fees. In spite of being away from the courts for a decade, she wades right in, and gets high-profile cases, like the possible murder of a cricketer, for which his girlfriend stands accused. In a couple of hearings, the culprit blurts out the truth and Noyonika gets a win. Of course, being the leading lady, she never loses, and always has a street smart investigator Sana Sheikh (Kubbra Sait) bringing crucial clues.
The show (written by Hussain Dalal, Abbas Dalal and Siddharth Kumar) picks some of the cases from the original show, but adds needless touches, reducing the notoriously tardy Indian legal system to instant popcorn made to last the show’s 40-45 minute running time. In between, she spars with her mother-in-law (Beena Banerjee), visits her husband in a too-clean jail to snap and glower at him, and supposedly slogs long hours, making one wonder what the other lawyers in the huge and gleaming office of the law firm do! For that matter what does Malini do but smoke and complain.
Sana, with her own romantic triangle going on with Dheeraj and a possessive cop (Amir Ali), is the most interesting of the supporting characters. The firm’s invisible third partner, Kishore Ahuja (Kiran Kumar) strides in, two female acolytes in tow, and brings a whiff of old Bollywood villainy. In the US, politicians have lobbyists and image consultants—there was Eli Gould in the original—here Rajiv has an all-purpose fixer, Ilyas Khan (Aseem Hattangadi), who has a solution for every problem and appears just when Noyonika has a crisis—personal or professional.
Her emotional turmoil is not even considered, and Noyonika, who huffs about justice and fairness, uncharacteristically resorts to underhand means to save her husband. “Shaadi ko nibhana padta hai,” she says like a 1950s “goodwife” – the label given to her by Daksh. The daughters, who were so traumatized by the father’s sexual escapade and watched his videos repeatedly, now ask Noyonika why she is punishing him by banishing him to the couch.
While having internal pop-philosophical monologues about love, trust, destiny and god, Kajol more than pulls her weight in keeping the wheels of the show sinking in the slush. She is the major attraction of the show, and probably the only reason why it will even have a second season.
(A slightly modified version of this piece first appeared in scroll.in)
