‘The Trial’ Review: Kajol Shines in a Show That Needs Nuance Instead of Binaries

Suparn Varma (with writers Hussain Dalal, Abbas Dalal, and Siddharth Kumar) has adapted the multi-season legal drama The Good Wife for an Indian audience as The Trial: Pyaar, Kanoon, Dhokha! The title and the tagline are self-explanatory. The show follows Noyonika Sengupta (Kajol), a promising lawyer who had to quit her job after marriage and kids, and now has to return to the profession following her husband’s arrest. 

How does her husband’s arrest for abuse of power affect Noyonika and her two young children? The show starts to address it multiple times but doesn’t keep its effort consistent to drive the point home. There’s also hope for exploration of privilege – people around Noyonika call her new house ‘small’; a 3-bedroom house she buys after selling their Mercedes. But the writing is too superficial to convey the complexities and nuances of privilege. 

Driven by circumstance, Noyonika uses her connections to land a job as a junior lawyer in a law firm. The two partners she comes in contact with right off the bat are Vishal (Alyy Khan) and Malini (Sheeba Chaddha) – the latter views Noyonika with skepticism and the former has history with her.

How these dynamics affect Noyonika’s career is one of the things that the writers sketch out well. 

Amongst other characters, there is another ambitious intern Dheeraj (Gaurav Pandey) who sees and treats Noyonika as his rival and believes that she has a leg-up in the race because of her friendship with Vishal. Noyonika also has allies in her fight, the most notable being Sana (an effortlessly charming Kubbra Sait) who rushes around doing minor investigative work and research to aid the lead’s arguments in court. 

Both Sait and Kajol have an easy chemistry that works for their scenes together, giving the show some much-required heart. As Noyonika, Kajol’s performance is satisfactory but there is so much of the actor’s skill that the character doesn’t explore, primarily because of an over reliance on dialogues and exposition. Kajol could convey volumes with just a glance in her last streaming showing in Lust Stories 2 and that reliance on the actor’s skill is mostly absent here.

Jisshu Sengupta who plays Noyonika's husband does so with ease - he ably shifts from a man trying to clear his name to one facing the consequences his actions have had on his family.

Chaddha, as the enterprising senior partner who looks out for her company’s interests above all else, wears her character like a second skin but what could’ve been an incredibly enticing character is, once again, shallow. 

What isn’t shallow is the background score – the sheer volume makes it seem like it’s trying to cover up the lapses in the script by telling the audience how and where to feel. Background music clashes with ambient music on the show; it’s loud where silence would’ve done the job. 

The show seemingly borrows from real-life news events in the country with one arc focusing primarily on a vulture-esque news anchor hell bent on vilifying a woman after her cricketer boyfriend dies by suicide.

This forms an almost parallel plot to Noyonika’s but it isn’t structured astutely so more often than not it feels like the two plots are taking away from each other. 

Some of the courtroom scenes tune into the shrewd, gripping nature of legal dramas (showcased expertly in Guilty Minds for instance) – a case involving a fetus and life insurance and one about a college student being arrested for murder are particularly interesting. 

Noyonika’s struggles go from office to home where she has to tackle being a single mother to two young daughters while her parenting is in conflict with her mother-in-law's regressive values. There is an insightful story about womanhood somewhere under the multiple layers of The Trial and it is the little glimpses of this that kept me watching.