Review: ‘Made in Heaven 2’ wins with its portrayal of LGBTQ stories

Made in Heaven Season 2 of the highly acclaimed web-series picks up six months after the events of season 1

Hyderabad: After four years of waiting, fans got a chance to see what happens to Tara and Karan’s Made in Heaven in the second season which dropped on Prime Video. Season 2 of the highly acclaimed web-series picks up six months after the events of season 1.

For the uninitiated, Tara Khanna (Sobhita Dhulipala is in the midst of divorce proceedings with cheating husband Adil Khanna (Jim Sarbh) and trying to salvage her wedding planning company ‘Made in Heaven’ which is running in losses due to the breakup. Dealing with the social fallout and lack of high-profile weddings, Tara and her business partner Karan Mehra (Arjun Mathur) have joined hands with loanshark Ramesh Jauhari (Vijay Raaz) who is now an active partner in the company. Jauhari brings in his wife Bulbul Jauhari (Mona Singh) as auditor in an effort to shore up the revenue. We also see Jazz (Shivani Raghuwanshi) and Kabir Basrai (Shashank Arora) navigate an on and off relationship while dealing with different familial pressures.

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Speaking purely on aesthetic terms, the styling of Made in Heaven is off the charts, the stylist for Sobhita deserves a raise. True to her gold digger roots, she is encouraged by her mother to get a sizeable alimony after she discovers that Faiza’s (Kalki Koechlin) pregnant with Adil’s child. Tara was written as a shady social climber, but this season, her desperate efforts to thrust herself back into south Delhi’s social circuit are embarrassing to witness. Her romance with the experimental chef Raghav (Ishwak Singh) also felt very rushed. She might be written as a strong, independent woman, but actually comes across very conniving, greedy and is most definitely not someone worth emulating.

Like the first season, writers of Made in Heaven 2 have done a great job in representing the LGBTQIA+ community. Karan and Meher’s arc shows that it’s possible to write gay and trans characters without beating drums around their sexual identity and pronouns. Meher Chaudhary is played by a real-life trans person Dr Trinetra Halder who does a beautiful job portraying the complex situations that are her every day life. However, the star of the series is Mona Singh who calmly berates Jazz for eating ‘three burgers with large fries’ while auditing MIH’s expenditures and deals with an errant teenage son caught in a school molestation scandal with equal poise.

In terms of the weddings, Radhika Apte’s episode that throws light on casteism in the bourgeois Indian households wins hands-down. Her simple Buddhist wedding as tribute to her Dalit roots is beautiful to watch. Made in Heaven still remains woke, but somewhere disconnects with the audience in trying to portray a critique on societal norms. However, the new additions to the cast more than make up for that.