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Guilty Minds Review: Making legal dramas is not our cup of tea

Review: Creating a web series on a legal case or any legal subject is considered a very difficult task. In the past, several attempts have been made on television, in which the lawyer is actually shown working as a detective and advocacy is done just to settle the case. Another problem is that the internal proceedings of the court are not glamorous at all. It is not at all the way it is shown in films. There are many cases in front of the judge in which some are correct, some are extremely useless and why some cases have been done, this should be kept in the dock of questions. The judge does not have the facility that he does not listen to any case, but he interferes a little in the matter of date. In the reality of the cases, many times difficult questions arise in front of the judge, lack of evidence, weakening of the case by presenting half-incomplete knowledge by the defense counsel and sometimes due to consummate and clever type of lawyers, the original of the case deviating from the objective. There are many such cases in which nothing is being done and the accused are either out for years or are in jail even after completing their sentence. Amazon Prime Video’s latest web series Guilty Minds is a decent attempt to see the world of courts from the point of view of lawyers. The well-known formulas are also there but the audience has been done a big favor by not dramatizing the activities inside the court and the judge.

Guilty Minds has a total of 10 episodes. Almost every episode is 50 minutes long, so don’t make the mistake of watching it together, watching one by one will not make much difference because a new case has been taken in each episode. The cases are of a new type this time. Consent, murder of an unknown person under the influence of video games, exploitation of natural resources by corporate companies, internal politics of IVF companies, scandals through dating apps and some similar topics have been kept. The unfortunate thing is that Shriya Pilgaonkar and Sugandha Garg, who are in the role of lawyers, are seen fighting all kinds of cases, which usually does not happen. There are separate lawyers for criminal cases, separate lawyers for civil cases, separate lawyers for corporate law cases and separate lawyers for arbitration. The good thing is that all the cases are very different, so in some cases the lawyers of the opposite parties are also new, due to which the cases look different.

In terms of acting, it is good to see two veterans Satish Kaushik and Kulbhushan Kharbanda, but the way their experience dominates the entire scene is a wonderful example in itself. Shriya Pilgaonkar acts very well in some episodes and in some her color remains faded. Work could have been done without making his colleague Sugandha Garg a lesbian, it seems that the race to create some different characters goes only there. Sugandha is a good actress but it is not possible to pull the entire episode right now. The acting of Varun Mitra, Shriya’s ex-boyfriend and her opponent in some case, impresses a lot. This is the biggest role of his career. Before this, he was seen in a film named Jalebi, along with Rhea Chakraborty. Next to this they have to do something totally different only then they can be noticed. Strong actors like Girish Kulkarni, Sanand Verma and Atul Kumar also appear in between and change the course of every episode, although they are guests of one episode only.

A lot of care has been taken in the writing of this series. Manav Bhushan, Shefali Bhushan, Deeksha Gujral and Jayant Digambar Somalkar have taken special care that Adalat should not be filmed. There are no film dialogues like ‘Ruk jaiye judge sahib’, or ‘Tarikh par tarikh’ or ‘Nahi manta main is verdict ko’. The judge also does not recite the verses of Tajirat-e-Hind, nor does he keep shouting order order. Director Shefali Bhushan and her co-director Jayant Somalkar deserve praise for the fact that they have controlled the shape and size of the court set. Every case appears in a different court, every time the lawyer and the judge are different and the set of each court is different, the language and way of speaking of the judge is different. Sometimes the speaking of the judge reminds one of a real court where even the judges get fed up listening to absurd cases all day long and then one or the other gets scolded. The lawyer gets scolded for the incomplete preparation of the lawyer, the witness for the stupid statements of the witnesses and sometimes even the present public. It seems that the inspiration has been taken from the way the court is shown in the Oscar-nominated Marathi film ‘Court’.

The web series is worth watching. Although OTT fans have seen the beautiful battle of law and legal claims in many web series like English web series Suits, How to Get Away with Murder, Boston Legal, Guilty Minds will be slow and less glamorous. We see web series like ‘Adalat’, ‘Criminal Justice’ or ‘Your Honor’ on the life of a law firm or a lawyer, which are made in a very filmy way or ‘Jolly LLB’, ‘Badla’ or ‘No One’. Movies like ‘Killed Jessica’ in which redundancy is considered necessary. ‘Guilty Minds’ is the first step towards a good legal web series, hope to see even better work ahead, maybe in its next season.