Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Made In Heaven’ On Amazon Prime, An Indian Dramedy About High-End Wedding Planners

Amazon’s Indian originals have been very watchable, showing a modern millennial sensibility up against the traditions of cities like Mumbai and Delhi. Their latest, Made In Heaven, takes on the idea of what an Indian wedding and marriage are supposed to be, while giving its main characters some interesting backstories. Read on for more on this show…

MADE IN HEAVEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A closeup of a woman nervously looking out the window, then reapplying her lipstick. Then we get a longer shot and notice she’s in an office, anxiously checking her watch to see when it’s time to leave for a meeting.

The Gist: Tara Khanna (Sobhita Dhulipala) co-owns Made In Heaven, a relatively new business that plans high-end weddings in Delhi. When she leaves her office, she joins her partner and best friend Karan Mehra (Arjun Mathur) to go to this very important meeting. She advises him to ditch the leather jacket he wants to wear. She knows how it’ll be received, because she’s familiar with the client.

The client is the Roshan family, wealthy industrialists with a bit of a reputation for no-holds-barred business practices. Their only son is getting married to a journalist and they want any prospective wedding planner to not only plan the complex, multi-day event but hire an investigator to look into the background of their son’s fiancee. The more established and traditional company, Harmony, refuses. But when Karan and Tara are asked, Karan says yes. They’re hired, despite their nebulous, non-traditional presentation.

Of course, once the groom gets wind that his parents wanted his fiancee investigated, he’s pissed. He knew that she had an abortion at one point — a no-no because upper-class Indian women are supposed to be “pure” when they get married — and doesn’t care. Karan suggests that he claims the baby was his. Tara, knowing what its like to marry into a prominent Delhi family, thinks her partner is off his gourd. When the fiancee gets wind of this, and she buggers off on the night of their sangeet (a pre-wedding party… think of it as an elaborate rehearsal dinner).

Karan and Tara need to get this wedding back on track because it’ll boost their fledgling business. Tara needs this because she wants to prove she can be more than the wife of an industrial scion — besides, things in her marriage to Adil (Jim Sarbh) aren’t all peachy keen, as she might soon find out.

Karan, on the other hand, just needs the cash to flow because he took out loans to finance his side of the business from some very sketchy sources, and the bill is coming due in a very threatening manner. Karan also has something else to juggle with: He’s not publicly out yet. His family has no idea he’s gay, and constantly tries to set him up with potential marriage candidates. In the meantime, his landlord Ramesh Gupta (Vinay Pathak) is suspicious that he’s bringing male lovers back to his apartment, which is apparently another no-no.

Our Take: Just like Amazon’s previous Indian original, Four More Shots Please!, Made In Heaven shows some interesting insight into modern Indian life, especially when traditions run up against millennials’ ambition and desire to go their own way. In this case, we’re in the more tradition-bound city of Delhi, rife with prominent families that have been that way for decades if not centuries. Watching Tara and Karan try to build their business by navigating these choppy cultural waters is the most interesting thing we saw in the first episode.

The series, created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, is structured almost like a procedural, with Karan and Tara trying to pull off a new wedding in each episode. But the creators also spend a fair amount of time building story arcs for the two of them, based on the fact that they’re both fighting hidebound tradition and misogyny in their own lives, not just their business. For Tara, it’s the notion that she should work for her husband’s family, or just stay home and be a wife and mother. For Karan, it’s the fact that he can’t be who he really is, even in 2019, and the fact that he’s got a bit of a penchant for taking too may risks in his life — both with the random men he brings home and the loans from unsavory sources he uses to finance his half of Made In Heaven.

We’re not 100% sure that the wedding-of-the-episode format is the best thing for Made In Heaven, considering how much interesting backstory Akhtar and Kagti give their main characters. But we’ll hold out judgement for the time being, because we’re not sure how repetitive that aspect of the show is going to get.

Sex and Skin: We see Karan in bed with his random lovers, and Tara and Adil having sex, but it’s pretty much all network-level stuff.

Parting Shot: As Tara waits for Adil to come home to have a romantic dinner, we see Adil arriving at the apartment of someone else. Oops.

Sleeper Star: Shivani Raghuvanshi plays Jaspreet Kaur, a new production assistant who not only has a crush on Karan, but has to fight against the fact that she comes from one of Delhi’s lower classes. She fights it so much, she insists on people calling her “Jazz.” her character’s story is only hinted at in the premiere but will be interesting to watch going forward.

Most Pilot-y Line: Senior planner Shibani Bagchi (Natasha Singh) very cynically tells Jazz about the arrangements for the Roshan wedding, “Soon you’ll realize what a bloody waste of money it is.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Made In Heaven is a fun watch, though we’re really unsure how the format will wear over nine episodes.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Made In Heaven on Amazon Prime Video