Why Does Kajol’s ‘The Trial,’ a Desi Remake of ‘The Good Wife,’ Carry the Stench of Saas-Bahu Series?

The Trial — Pyaar, Kaanoon, Dhokha

Cast: Kajol, Jisshu Sengupta, Kubbra Sait, Sheeba Chaddha, Alyy Khan, Gaurav Pandey, Aamir Ali, Aseem Hattangady 

Direction: Suparn Verma

Rating: ★½

Streaming on Disney+Hotstar

Fourteen years after Alicia Florrick, Kalinda Sharma, Will Gardner and Diane Lockhart spoiled us silly with the insanely entertaining story of a woman rising from the ashes of her marriage and a sex scandal to become a very successful lawyer, two production houses got together to recreate that drama in the Indian context.

The Good Wife, which sustained our interest for seven seasons and then treated us to a spin-off, The Good Fight, for another six, was more than just the story of a woman married to a philandering, high-profile state attorney, their crumbling marriage and the bechari biwi finding herself. 

Rooted in our collective bewilderment over the good wives of cheating husbands who stand by them in their moments of public humiliation, a la Hillary Clinton, The Good Wife moved the gaze from the corrupt, powerful men and the media frenzy around them to the wronged, shamed but stoic wife. It didn’t just tell the story of her life that was, and didn’t dwell much on the perfect marriage and vows taken. Instead, it used that as a backdrop to tell us a much more compelling story of a woman who returns to work after 13 years and slowly begins to nail it.

After The Good Wife’s first episode itself, the marriage took a back seat, and the show was mostly about the razzmatazz of Chicago lawyers who won impossible cases, lost easy ones, tried hard to save their firm and in between romanced a colleague.

There wasn’t a single insipid character or actor in that entire series. The cheating husband was played Chris North, his campaign strategist Eli Gold was played with seductive cunning by Alan Cumming, and even the opposing lawyers were all so entertaining — especially Elsbeth Tascioni and Louis Canning played by Michal J. Fox — that each one had a separate, special hook into us. 

Each courtroom drama was riveting, each criminal was a potential new series unto himself, especially Colin Sweeny and Lemond Bishop. 

The official desi version of The Good Wife feels like we have been forcibly moved from the First Class to the back row in Economy though we had the right boarding pass.

Starring Kajol as humiliated wife Noyonika Sengupta, and Jisshu Sengupta as additional judge Rajiv Sengupta who is caught in a seeking-sexual-favors-for-bribes scandal, the series that credits three writers and is directed by Suparn Verma has a gloomy pall of behenji-dom that’s peculiar to our saas-bahu TV series. 

The crumbling marriage in The Trial is not a niggling piece of chicken stuck between Noyonika’s teeth. It is a full tandoori chicken in a thali that she must carry on her head all the time.

The court cases, the dialogue, the characters, and the actors playing them bring zero joy to the screen because all of it feels so old, so trite, so Bollywood. There’s a seen-that-and-seen-that-too quality to every character and scene in The Trial.  

The court cases — freedom of press, abortion rights, insurance, and the media trial of a celebrity suicide — are inspired from the original series. Though on paper some of them have been given an Indian context, there’s a fakeness and artificiality to them because of the default mode in which Bollywood writes and directs stuff.  

Apart from downgrading exciting court cases, what struck me most about The Trial was the number of terrible characters and bad actors it had. In fact, I have never seen so many bad actors together in one frame, frame after frame, in any OTT series.

Noyonika gets two whiney daughters who have no personality, a mother-in-law who seems to have walked out of a TV commercial about Diwali mithai, and a husband who is so dull and slimy that it makes you wonder why she married him at all. 

Alyy Khan, who plays Noyonika’s boss and love interest Vishal, is competent but stiff. Though a kiss does thaw him and gives their connection some sizzle, I really have no interest in this affair.  

The very talented Sheeba Chaddha is saddled with a wig of such crisp ringlets that I wanted to touch them and see if they would crumble like Kurkure when pressed.

Gaurav Pandey brings some much-needed meanness and villainy to the show. And though I always find Kubbra Sait an interesting actor, the way her character is written robs her of all spunk and masti.   

The Trial, co-produced by Ajay Devgn Ffilms, has Kajol at the center and she does most of the heavy lifting. 

Kajol has never been a bad actress. In fact, she has always been good, but she has always operated in strictly familial spaces and there too she has been limited to the pinning-for-the-man-I-love zone. I don’t recall any of her performances that stood out. 

Here she does finally get out of that zone and though initially there’s a disturbing awkwardness to her acting, she begins to come into her own as the series progresses. 

Somewhere in the middle of the eight-episode show, her character begins to get a slow, drip feed of feminism and she talks about why women need to be loyal to shitty men, vagehra. But each feminist line is delivered like a whip that must be noted, My Lord. Along with this, she is made to do a lot of puja of bhagwanjis to, perhaps, lure a larger, family audience with aarti thaalis.  

Each episode of The Trial ends with a short lecture by Noyonika about something. I kind of zoned out at each one because the banality of the gyaan about relations, dhokha, pyaar, jobs, justice and mard versus ma was just too boring.

I duly watched all the eight episodes of The Trial and then I decided to rewatch The Good Wife to refresh my memory and put the desi version in perspective. 

It must be noted, My Lady, that I had to force myself to watch The Trial, and could not stop watching The Good Wife. I now have just four seasons to go.