Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo Review: Dimple Kapadia’s Show Is Undeniably Bingeworthy

Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo Review: Dimple Kapadia powers the show with an impressively impactful star turn. Radhika Madan etches out a young woman of substance who does not yield an inch in her pursuit of things that matter to her. A thriller spearheaded by Dimple Kapadia as the matriarch of a family of drug dealers in a lawless North Indian desert town, Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo transports us to a world of flawed, tough and unapologetic women who live life queen size wholly on their own terms.

The women reap the perks of power but also pay the price for their intrepid ways – the conflict between rewards and reprisals forms the core of the unconventional family drama that is, to an extent, a quirky rural variation on Disney+Hotstar’s Aarya. Strong atmospherics, a storyline that brims with emotions and action, a slew of solid performances and a script that delivers a full complement of twists and turns combine to make Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo a satisfying, if not necessarily scintillating, show.

The eight-episode Hotstar Specials series alternates between the explosive and the slow burn, the taut and the winding. It follows a dysfunctional family in which nothing is what it appears to be on the surface. That is hardly surprising. Much of the tale unfolds in a secret bunker, the site where the family grows its opium, a place that the rest of the world has no inkling of. Several fraught relationships – same-sex, bordering on the incestuous, unrequited, heart-breaking, purely romantic, the works – and uneasy interpersonal equations threaten to upset the delicate balance that keeps the brood together. A succession war rages within the family as the woman who runs the business announces her intention to formally name the legal inheritor of her empire.

Besides turning the saas-bahu dynamic on its head and mining it for its innate potential to spring surprises, the crime drama delivers a thrilling plot in which women call all the shots even as the men around them do all that they can not to make things easy for them. But the show isn’t so much about the gender divide and its implications as it is about a clash between ambition and familial bonds and its fallout. The series isn’t even-paced – parts of it are a touch sluggish and meandering – but whenever it gathers momentum and hits its straps, Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo, created and directed by Homi Adajania, is thoroughly engaging and entertaining, thanks to a meaty script by Saurav Dey, Nandini Gupta and Aman Mannan.

Set in a fictional desert in a province called Rann Pradesh, the series makes great use of the earthy backdrop, captured evocatively through the lens of director of photography Linesh Desai. This is a landscape where danger lurks at every corner for Savitri (Dimple Kapadia), who, from a haveli that hides many a secret, plies an illegal trade that is euphemistically called Rani Cooperative. Its annual turnover is upwards of ₹ 500 crore but nobody can figure out how a business run on the lines of a self-help group can be such a massive money-spinner.