Family Secrets:
The first season of Tripling came out in 2016, when the virus had not opened up the OTT Pandora’s box. The content was so different from the melodramatic and old-fashioned soap operas prevalent on television then, that this and other TVF shows caught on with young audiences.
It was, by 2022 standards (after the glut of web series), quite ordinary and unambitious, depending on the novelty of the idea of three squabbling siblings taking a road trip from Mumbai to Manali appealing to viewers. Their chatter sounded real and not at all like the overwritten lines of the saas-bahu serials. The characters spoke, dressed and looked like urban people everybody had come across at some point, as opposed to the silk-and-jewellery dripping folk living in palatial La La Lands. By Season 2 (2019) when the siblings took another road trip to Sikkim, the series had already lost most of its zing.
Season 3 (on Zee5), written by Sumeet Vyas and directed by Neeraj Udhwani, does not even make an attempt to entertain; it is placid to the point of being soporific. There is no road trip this time, presumably because no car company shelled out for product placement.
The plot takes off from where it had left off, expecting the characters to be remembered and missed! Chandan’s (Vyas) second book has failed, Chanchal (Maanvi Gagroo) is still playing Ranisa in her husband Pranav’s (Kunal Roy Kapoor) palace, and and Chitwan (Amol Parashar) is a drifter being fun daddy to his girlfriend’s kid.
Their lives are supposedly so dull and meaningless that they all rush to their parents’ hillside bungalow on hearing that they are separating after 36 years of a happy marriage. They are not particularly dutiful children at the best of times, as their father points out eventually, so their sudden, intense panic is out of character. Being given names from a drippy Saraswatichandra song, Chandan sa badan chanchal chitwan, may have been the cause of some latent hostility. That their parents also have ‘Ch’ names, Chinmay (Kumud Mishra) and Charu (Shenaz Patel) does not make it any better.
The siblings in their thirties, with enough relationship baggage of their own, whine and sniffle, because how can their parents do this to them! Then they get another shock, their childhood home has been sold to be turned into a boutique hotel.
Instead of a road trip, the Sharma family goes on a trek, which does not offer any more comic or dramatic potential than princeling Pranav having to undergo the trauma of pooping behind a tree!
Chandan’s ex, Paula (Sarah Anjuli) carts along a shrink (Prabudh Dayma) in the hope of talking sense into the parents, who are showing all signs of going through a midlife crisis, and dealing with it quite competently.
The story is cursorily wrapped up in five episodes of about 24 minutes each, as if the makers couldn’t be bothered to flesh out the script, dig out some real emotions or mine for humour from the situation, which is not even unique in this day and age when marriages break up all the time. Given such feeble material, the actors put in minimal effort too. Pity, because there was scope for a real modern family drama here and such a fine cast to tackle any complexity thrown at them.
(This piece appeared first in rediff.com)
