Family Man Season 3 gives us a hero on the run and a villain with main character energy

In less than two weeks, I saw the third season of two very popular shows, Delhi Crime and The Family Man. Both Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah) and Srikant Tiwari (Manoj Bajpayee) endeared themselves to us by portraying the men and women next door who have dedicated their lives to public service and the security of their fellow citizens. While Delhi Crime’s new season felt altered because of the Ram Gopal Varma-inspired shot taking and lighting, The Family Man Season 3 made a strange choice of putting Srikant on the back foot, and giving us a villain who was written and filmed like a hero.

Having Srikant chased like a criminal was a great storyline for the first season of a different show or a standalone movie—a decorated spy is accused of being a traitor and forced to go on the run. But like the unfortunate youngest sibling who gets compared to an overachieving older sibling, Season 3 of The Family Man, though entertaining to watch, underwhelms in comparison to its predecessors. Over the past two seasons, Srikant Tiwari has been almost omnipresent, travelling to Kashmir, Kandahar, Balochistan, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and Vedaranyam, trying to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. To then watch him be reactive instead of proactive is unsettling. To watch him look helpless, requiring other people to save his wife and kids (remember that scene from Season 2 when he rescues Dhriti and she collapses in his arms), or have a tepid confrontation with the villain instead of leading a delicious cat-and-mouse chase, is unsatisfying.

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One major differentiating factor this season is the way its antagonists are written and filmed. Season 1 had ISIS-trained chemical weapons expert Moosa Rehman (Neeraj Madhav) and Season 2 had Tamil rebel operative Raji (Samantha Ruth Prabhu), along with Sajid (Shahab Ali), a radicalised Kashmiri man who was common to both storylines. In both seasons, Srikant’s fight was as much against what they stood for as it was for what they intended to do. It was a clash between two ideologies and purposes, not just a hero chasing a villain. Moosa, Raji and Sajid were all victims of horrific crimes, and their trauma made them the perfect candidates for those looking to brainwash young men and women. In Season 3, Rukma (Jaideep Ahlawat) is a drug dealer and a gun for hire who can kill someone for money. Though Jaideep performs wonderfully as the charismatic, soft-spoken villain, one does not feel conflicted by his journey as we could with Moosa or Raji. His motives of greed and then grief are not linked to a larger ideological or politically significant cause, nor driven by real-life events like the Gujarat riots (Moosa) or state-sponsored violence against an ethnic group (Raji). The show doesn’t play on his status as an outsider in the North East, or show us how or why he went from being a man in uniform to a drug lord. Also, Meera (Nimrat Kaur), a powerful fixer, developing an emotional connection with Rukma, simply does not have the same effect as the tender bond of mutual respect and rage that Sajid and Raji forged.

With both Moosa and Raji, there was a slow buildup and then a powerful reveal of who they actually were and what they were capable of. Who can forget that iconic scene in the hospital when Moosa transforms into a ruthless murderer who kills his comatose colleague and the nurse he has honey-trapped with his charm and tears? Or that scene in a small dark lane where Raji goes from being a frightened, silent woman on the bus to a lethal killer who can murder men twice her size with her bare hands. Raj and DK created bad guys who, like Srikant, could blend into a crowd, making it harder for him and his team to find them. This led to thrilling hit-and-miss moments and layers of lies and deception. Srikant and JK bump into Raji on a street, only to realise later that she is a sleeper agent. They assume that Moosa is the weak link who can be broken, only to discover he is an internationally wanted terrorist who has been hoodwinking them. But Rukma is not someone trying to stay under the radar. With his strapping physicality, long hair, entourage of men and pithy one-liners, Rukma could well be a villain from a Bollywood movie whom people take chartered flights to meet. His intentions and potential for violence are established right away, leaving us little to discover or be surprised by as the episodes unfold.

The best moments of Season 3 involved Srikant and his family or his exchanges with JK, but I missed the chaos in Srikant’s life that made the first two seasons so relatable and fun. Srikant has to abruptly leave a meeting at his daughter’s school because a terrorist escapes, or leave his son’s birthday party to track a group of people suspected of planning a terror attack. In societies around the world, women are constantly asked how they balance family responsibilities and their careers. In a subversion of this rather sexist question, ‘The Family Man’ had a man struggling to have it all and do it all. So, while Srikant resorts to extreme measures to keep his family safe in Season 3, I missed the tension created by him having to juggle school pick-ups and shootouts in the span of a day.

Srikant’s superpower is that he could be the man standing next to you at a vada pav stall or in a local train. For the first two seasons, the villains he was chasing and the supporting cast were also regular-looking folk like him. Perhaps the attempts to increase the scale of the show impacted the elements that made it different in the first place. Additionally, creating a villain with far too much main-character energy (perhaps to match Jaideep Ahlawat’s rising stardom) feels out of place in a show that was built on the premise of ordinary-looking people being capable of extraordinary courage or unthinkable evil. Here’s hoping that Season Four or Part Two of Season Three brings back the thrill of the chase and gives us a finale worthy of the show’s legacy.