Tag Archives: Series Review

TV Series Review: Citadel (2023)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

This review covers the first two episodes of the Amazon Prime series Citadel.

Amazon’s newest spy series Citadel is fun and totally watchable, thanks to a great cast and a fun, high-concept plot setup.

Citadel is the name of an international spy organization that works for the global good, independent of any single nation. Their efforts are thwarted by an evil spy ring called Manticore that has its tendrils in governments around the world.

Citadel agents Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and Mason Kane (Richard Madden) — who was destined from birth to be a spy with a name like that — are doing reconnaissance on a train in Italy when they realize they’ve been set up. Manticore blows up the train as part of a coordinated worldwide effort to destroy Citadel once and for all.

Mason survives but has total amnesia, except for visions of a beautiful woman in a red dress: Nadia, wearing the outfit she was wearing on the train. His American passport has an alias, so he doesn’t even know his real name.

Eight years later, Mason has a wife and a daughter, but he’s still troubled by the void of information from his past. When he sends a DNA sample to an ancestry company, it alerts one of Citadel’s surviving operators, Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci), who tracks down the missing agent and upends his life.

Of course, Nadia survived the train explosion as well, but she doesn’t play a major part again until Episode 2.

The series does a nice job balancing its action, drama, and humor. Tucci’s role is dryly comical and everything one would hope from from Stanley Tucci, The Spy. Madden does a lot of the heavy lifting in the first episode, and he does a very solid job.

From what I’ve seen of Chopra Jonas’s forays in Hollywood to date, they haven’t fully captured what a good actor she is. Citadel does. She gets to showcase a wide emotional range and an impressive set of fighting skills, demonstrating why she is a global star.

The series — which is intended to eventually spin off into global versions set in India, Italy, Spain, and Mexico in languages native to each country — does enough in its early episodes to set up a compelling first season. Bernard gets Mason up to speed while forcing him to resurrect his old career, thereby uncovering the remaining threats to Citadel, its personnel, and the world. It’s a fun setup that balances the personal consequences for the agents with wider, more nebulous dangers that hooked me right away.

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Series Review: Aranyak (2021)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Aranyak on Netflix

Aranyak is Netflix India’s answer to Twin Peaks. With a compelling story and right-sized episodes, the supernatural (or is it?) murder mystery is made to be binged.

Aranyak takes place in the perpetually overcast fictional mountain town of Sironah, surrounded by a dense forest. Police officer Angad Malik (Parambrata Chattopadhyay) arrives to take over duties from Kasturi Dogra (Raveena Tandon), who’s taking a leave of absence from the force to deal with family issues.

On the day Angad arrives, a French tourist named Julie (Breshna Khan) reports her teenage daughter Aimee (Anna Ador) missing. Angad and Kasturi bicker over who should lead the case until Aimee’s body is found hanged in a tree. The cops agree to work together, putting Kasturi’s leave on hold.

Aimee’s death hits Sironah hard because of its similarities to a series of murders 19 years earlier that left over a dozen young women dead and the residents of the town emotionally scarred — none more so than Kasturi’s father-in-law Mahadev (Ashutosh Rana). He led the investigation into the murders but was unable to find the killer known as the “leopard man.”

The leopard man is a figure of local myth: a murderous beast and also the steward of a crop of “mystery mushrooms” that cure disease, but at a grievous cost to those who consume them. Whether the killer from 19 years ago was a man or a monster remains up for debate in Sironah.

One curious fact about the new crime is that all the rich and politically-connected residents in town seem to know that something bad happened to Aimee before the police do. Local politician Jagdamba (Meghna Malik) and sketchy rich guy Kuber Manhas (Zakir Hussain) try to leverage that information to their advantage.

There are many more characters and possible suspects. The story — written by Rohan Sippy and Charudutt Acharya — does a nice job of keeping all of them somehow connected to the crimes of the present or past. Each of the series’ eight episodes runs about 40 minutes, giving enough time to flesh out characters and their motivations without getting bogged down in backstory.

The runtime gives enough space to deal with the themes that Aranyak shares with Twin Peaks: collective trauma, whether evil exists as an independent entity or whether it’s simply individual moral corruption, and how “good” people reckon with this evil in their midst.

One of the more interesting characters is the politician Jagdamba. Her position is in jeopardy because her young adult son Kanti (Tejaswi Dev Chaudhary) was previously convicted of rape. She wants to protect him, but she also believes that he committed the current crime and fears that he might do it again. She’s concerned not just because he’s a political liability, but because she doesn’t want him to hurt anyone else — yet she’s not sure how to stop him. She loves her son, but he might be irredeemable.

This subplot fits with the show’s focus on the dangers faced by women, be it rape, murder, roofies, or cyberstalking. The stakes are raised for Kasturi because she has a daughter, Nutan (Tanseesha Joshi), who is the same age as Aimee. One of the commonalities between Aimee’s death and the murders from 19 years ago is that the police weren’t able to prevent any of them, only respond to them after the fact.

Aranyak has a few glaring flaws. Kasturi does stupid things that put people in danger, and she’s never heard of the jugular vein. Action scenes in the final episode defy the laws of space-time. The finale’s closing shot is sincerely crazy. The whole reason I watched the show was because Shah Shahid of the Split Screen Podcast warned me that the show’s final seconds were nuts, and he was right.

That said, the story build-up to that point is solid enough to make time invested in Aranyak worthwhile. Consistently good performances help, too, with special acknowledgement of Joshi as Nutan and Wishveash Sharkholi as Bunty, her boyfriend. Though the story feels complete as is, I’m very curious to see where Season 2 would go, based on the finale’s closing seconds.

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TV Review: Indian Matchmaking (2020)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Indian Matchmaking on Netflix

Indian Matchmaking took Twitter by storm as soon as it premiered on Netflix. Perhaps Delhi Belly actress Poorna Jagannathan summed up the early reaction best with her tweet: “#IndianMatchmaking was horrifying. Also, #Netflix, how soon can you drop season 2 (asking for a friend)”.

Indian Matchmaking features Mumbai-based professional matchmaker Sima Taparia trying to find suitable partners for singles in India and the United States, setting them up on dates and bringing in experts like a life coach, astrologer, and face reader when necessary.

The series is quick to get through, with most of its eight episodes clocking in at under forty minutes. The first episode introduces three characters who are effective hooks: likable Nadia from New Jersey; Texas lawyer and excellent reality TV villain Aparna (who at one point says, “You know how I hate comedy”); and Mumbai jewelry designer Pradhyuman, who would rather be anywhere else than on this show and is cringey to watch as a result.

But Indian Matchmaking has some serious issues, often because of what goes unchallenged by the show. Yashica Dutt wrote a great article in The Atlantic about the show’s inherent casteism. Taparia frequently touts potential prospects’ “fair” complexions, but the show doesn’t address the obvious colorism in her remarks.

Part of the problem is that Indian Matchmaking — a Netflix Original series — was made with no input from Netflix India. It’s an American creation from Los Angeles-based filmmaker Smriti Mundhra, who was apparently the only South Asian involved in the production, according to Variety.

Besides the show’s social and cultural problems, there’s also the fact that it’s just not that well made. Mundhra received awards for her 2017 documentary A Suitable Girl, which also deals with arranged marriage and also stars Taparia. But a 90-minute film is different than an 8-episode series, and Mundhra doesn’t nail the transition from one medium to the other.

Casting is an issue. Over a hundred potential subjects were narrowed down to eight people willing to have their romantic lives scrutinized on TV. Of the eight, the only reliable content generator is Aparna, who appears in five of the show’s episodes. Nadia is gone after three episodes. Pradhyuman’s exit in Episode 5 overlaps with the introduction of the series’ most tragic figure, Akshay — another rich Mumbai guy who wants even less to do with the show than Pradhyuman, but whose overbearing mother Preeti is so desperate to show the world how wealthy her family is that she happily sacrifices her son.

Akshay features in four episodes, as does Texas school counselor Vyasar. Delhi fashion designer Ankita stars in three, while single mother Rupam is only in two episodes. The eighth and final single is a woman whose name I don’t even remember who is introduced in the last ten minutes of the series.

If Mundhra intended for each cast member to get his or her own episode, that clearly wasn’t going to work. Besides the two cringey guys who didn’t want to be there, a couple of the women realized during filming that there were either better ways to meet available men or that they weren’t as interested in marriage as they thought they were.

To make up for that lack of usable material, Mundhra stretches storylines in some places and recycles them in others. Episodes 5 and 6 both end with Vyasar mentioning his need to have the same important conversation with his date, Rashi. If that conversation ever happened, it didn’t make it into the show.

Almost every character’s story ends with them on a positive date, but with no clear closure to their storyline. Aparna does goat yoga with a nice guy named Jay, and then she’s just gone. I guess we’re supposed to assume that they lived happily ever after? (The LA Times, Oprah magazine, and Esquire wrote follow up articles about whether any of the relationships formed on the show succeeded.)

Beyond the more serious negative cultural impact of Indian Matchmaking, bad casting and deceptive editing make the series unsatisfying to watch. I’m sure it’ll get renewed for a second season, but I don’t need to see it.