Maharani Season 4 review: Huma Qureshi series needs sharpness, brevity

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The addition of Darsheel Safary and Rajeshwari Sachdev lends a bit of freshness, the latter written with a little more zest than the former. She plays the paramour of Prime Minister Joshi (Vipin Sharma) who hates Bihar CM Rani Bharti’s (Huma Qureshi) guts even more than before, and like all smart women who know when to speak and when to stay silent, Sachdev’s character is all about smart moves.

Safary is to be seen in London, sitting on a bench with headphones-and-laptop, denoting a serious student, and Rani Bharti’s good beta, as opposed to bad beta Jay (Shardul Bharadwaj) who is up to his usual tricks back in Patna, having been shocked and disappointed by his mom’s decision to hand over the reigns of the state to his ‘badi behen’ (Shweta Basu Prasad), who gets to mouth a filmi dialogue — ‘ma see baat karne se pehle beti se baat karo‘! Yes, we see what the writers did there.

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It’s an open secret that the two main characters are based on Atal Behari Vajpayee and Rabri Devi, with Qureshi’s naive homemaker being foisted as a placeholder for her jailed husband, something we witnessed in the first season. But the lines are very much borrowed from this era, with Sharma’s PM reading off a teleprompter, and characters using phrases like ‘washing machine rinse dry’, ‘jumlebaazi’, and, yes, even this one, ‘Rani Bharti kaun?’ Haha. Said Rani Bharti is now a ‘doordrishti neta’, thinking of how to keep the state within the family, and setting her sights on the nation’s biggest gaddi in Delhi.

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One of the reasons I enjoy watching the show, whose characters work hard, sometimes too hard, to keep the accent and body language intact, is Kani Kusruti: this time around, this faithful aide to Rani Bharti has personal ambitions of her own. Pramod Pathak, as the statesman-like figure who wants to do the right thing, keeps the balance. Amit Sial, plotting away in jail, doesn’t have much to do. Qureshi is familiar but still leads from the front and one of her ma-beta scenes with Shardul Bhardwaj is among the better parts of the show.

This season has come to an end, without an end in sight: clearly there will be more. Brevity and sharpness is the need of the hour.

Maharani Season 4 cast: Huma Qureshi, Vipin Sharma, Kani Kusruti, Shweta Basu Prasad, Shardul Bhardwaj, Rajeshwari Sachdev, Amit Sial, Pramod Pathak, Vineet Kumar
Maharani Season 4 director: Puneet Prakash
Maharani Season 4 rating: 2.5 stars