The Best

The Family Man Amazon Prime Video

It broke the subtitle barrier. Season 2 of The Family Man delivered action so riveting that it compelled a Hindi viewing audience to watch a series where half the conversations took place in Tamil. That’s never happened before. The series created by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK stars Manoj Bajpayee his brow heavy with an eternal  weariness as a secret agent perpetually struggling with work/life balance. Vasan Bala took a simple, well-observed story about the fickleness of fame and faith and turned it into a zany riff on the nature of fandom, with movies and religions both needing bhakts. Balas Spotlight is a selfreflexive trip that speaks in movie quotes and skewers its own star certainly but pays even truer tribute by pointing out where the pretender goddess from Ray’s Devi might have ended up today.

The Worst

Sunflower ZEE5

A tender coconut delivered to a man’s doorstep is poisoned by a neighbour. This leads to a murder mystery set around the many residents of a housing society. The idea is promising, but this overwritten, over-long series created by Vikas Bahli is a noisy, torturous bore populated by shrill caricatures and dogged by bad jokes that need laugh-tracks. The Family Man heads the Best column, but it needs mention here as well. After a progressive first season the show smelt a bit Islamophobic this year with most Muslim characters turned into exaggeratedly evil villains, and an irresponsible equation. It also drew criticism for depicting the Eelam movement in a harshly one sided manner and for casting the talented Samantha Akkineni as a Sri Lankan rebel and darkening her face  for the part.

The ones that could have been better

Kartik Subbarajs Jagame Thandhiram not only trivialised the issues of xenophobia it attempted to address but criminally used up Dhanush an actor who seems more explosive with each film in something eminently forgettable. The film about a man eating tiger is slow and measured yet paints characters it doesnt like a hunter a husband with jarringly broad strokes while its efficient heroine learns nothing and achieves little. Drabness does not make for insight.

The Most Unexpected

Abhishek Chaubeys Hungama Hai Kyon Barpa handles a clever short story with silken gloves. Staying true to the material it filigrees the humour with magic and with that most magical sounding of languages Urdu. Bajpayee and Gajraj Rao are superb as two men meeting on a train at two different stages of lifes journey, and Chaubey lets them wrestle on and on much to the viewers delight. This is a work of admirable craftsmanship like the mystical timepiece at the story’s heart not only delivering a great time but transporting us to a lovelier one.Fame has changed him and he is glad of it and so he performs the flourishes of a famous man an important man with theatricality. Fear, on the other hand beats fame and makes him revert to the man he was, shifty and nervous and unimpressive.The smugness with which Bajpayee delivers an Urdu line, convinced of its greatness and his own is something special as is his breathless panic at the thought of comeuppance.