Kajol’s The Trial, Shahid Kapoor’s Farzi and Priyanka Chopra’s Citadel: The weakest web shows of 2023 had the biggest stars | Web Series News

Take, for example, the Indian version of The Good Wife: The Court, starring Kajol, wasn’t terrible because of its leading lady, who tried too hard to be believable; It just couldn’t strike a balance between its star and other actors. Kajol is enough of an actress to pull off tough scenes, but the series doesn’t really get a chance to be impactful as she is constantly concerned with how to enhance her lead role.

Farz

I had the same problem with ‘Farzi’, which is about clever fakers and clever artists, produced and directed by the prolific duo of Raj and DK. Top billing, quite rightly, went to Shahid Kapoor. And everything tilted in Kapoor’s favor as he was the biggest Bollywood name in it.

The other actors, especially Vijay Sethupathi and the excellent Kay Kay, are reduced to supporting actors as they always were in our mainstream films.

The insistence on keeping the star in a popular position, transformed into a format that must be far more fair and democratic to be effective, destroys it. Why is it so hard to understand?

Citadel

Actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden in a shot from The Citadel. (Photo: Instagram/CitadelonPrime)

Take another example. Beyond the grisly spy saga The Citadel — not exactly an “Indian” series starring the Russo Bros. Hemmings and Richard Madden, but Priyanka Chopra getting that all-important second billing, of course we claim it’s ours — she did nothing ( except for that billing) for Chopra and did nothing for it either. It wouldn’t have mattered if someone else had been in his place. Chopra went the whole hog—stunning body-hugging dresses, deft kicks and punches—but nothing worked.

guns and gulabs

I was really looking forward to Raj and DK’s Guns and Gulaabs because, really, how bad could anything be with Rajmumar Rao? But this throwback to the ’90s, with its cassette players, breathy pop songs and Sanjay Dutt-inspired mullet-sporting goofs, feels like a collection of scenes and sequences that pepper so much of what we thought we’d left behind, for good reason. I couldn’t find any reason to bring back that era here, unless it was just, you know, let’s do the ’90s thing, with bell bottoms and half-off sweaters and songs.

freelancer

Mohit Raina hosted the series The Freelancer.

A good actor needs a good script. Mohit Raina, so good in Mumbai Diaries 1 and 2, couldn’t get enough of the “freelancers’ hot plot featuring terrorists, kidnappers, depressed wives, beautiful sanatoriums and dangerous hotspots around the world: you can get exactly the same mix. , and turned it into a temper tantrum, but this Neeraj Pandey outing, which also stars Anupam Kerr and Sushant Singh, was flawed from the start.