Perfect Family Review: A Gen-Z Family Trauma

BOTTOM LINE
A Gen-Z Family Trauma

PLATFORM
YOUTUBE

RUNTIME
6 Hours, 8 Episodes

What Is the Show About?

The Kakarias run a mithai business in the heart of Delhi, yet their lives are sour. Vishnu, the younger son, stalls in his corporate career, while his wife, Neeti, carries deep domestic trauma. The parents coax their daughter, Pooja, to reunite with her husband, Ashok. When granddaughter Daani injures a boy in her class, the family is finally advised to undergo joint therapy.

Performances

It’s hard to point a finger at the performances. The casting is top-notch, and every actor/character gets a scope to make their presence felt. The real-life couple Manoj Pahwa and Seema Pahwa are the pick of the lot; their class shines through even in the ordinary moments of the characters’ lives, effortlessly.

Gulshan Devaiah yet again proves why he’s one of the most versatile actors in the business. Girija Oak is apt in the shoes of the traumatised wife who never gets a say in family matters. Kaveri Seth is impressive, though her role remains underwritten. Neha Dhupia’s sophistication works well to play a psychiatrist.

Analysis

Perfect Family, a show marking Pankaj Tripathi’s production debut, created by Palak Bhambri and directed by Sachin Pathak, is a much-needed upgrade to the traditional family drama template. It rejects the long-glorified notion of an ideal parivaar and the done-to-death conflict between tradition and modernity. While the drama isn’t any less intense here, it comes with an element of empathy and sensitivity.

The dysfunctionality in the Kakaria household is palpable from the start. The eldest Kakaria, a halwai by profession, embodies the typical, toxic ‘mard’, treating everyone like a doormat. His wife, Kamla, tirelessly serving the indifferent men, is unaware of her own internalised toxicity. Constantly crushed by societal expectations, their son Vishnu fails to find happiness both at work and home.

His wife Neeti is itching to return to work and seeks to move away from the joint family, but finds little support from her husband. Meanwhile, Vishnu’s sister Pooja, in a troubled marriage, is eager to take the reins from her father. Growing up in a family lost in its own tussle, the Kakaria granddaughter Daani’s angst violently manifests at school when she injures a classmate.

The fiasco at school forces the family to undergo joint therapy, albeit reluctantly. The sessions with psychiatrist Megha provide a hook to uncover the unresolved trauma and anger in each of their lives. Everyone in the family presumes they know each other well, until the counselling proves otherwise. Every episode peels through a different layer of the family and their past.

In terms of the writing, Perfect Family is heavily reliant on character backstories to explain their present actions, suggesting these traumas are the sole cause of all their problems. The motivations attached to the behavioural patterns are logical and detailed on paper, but on screen, a predictable pattern creeps in. There’s an obsession with foreshadowing the traits and the events from the past.

The core idea is simple: put a supposedly normal family in focus and showcase everything abnormal about them. Yet, everything is over-explained; one feels that minimalism and subtlety are a lost art in this script. We get cracked heels, sore fingers, daddy issues, teary-eyed women, sermons on normalising divorce, the mental-health checklist just doesn’t end.

The structuring of the show, at times, is particularly interesting, especially in the way it handles issues exclusive to men, women, and the events in their lives across different episodes, charting their gradual transformation. In between their problems, there’s still some unverbalised empathy too, a sense of ‘we’re there for each other, but we’re too desi to discuss it.’

At every step, visual motifs externalise the discussions: the painting of a woman surrendering to a surreal beach view, the pottery session where the patriarch builds a mud-house resembling his childhood home. There’s genuine consistency in the storytelling, but you wish it also featured an average day at home, where the drama wasn’t dialled up to eleven.

As much as you want to appreciate the team for initiating conversations on mental health, the drama overdose eats you up. The burden of every character grows with every episode, leaving the viewer tired of the sob stories, however real they may seem. The show pressurises itself to stay balanced, politically correct, ticking too many boxes, and ultimately, forgets to fully engage.

Perfect Family puts mental health in the spotlight through a dysfunctional Gen-Z family. The intent is appreciable, like your low-budget Kapoor and Sons in an intimate setup, but the storytelling loses bite after a point.

Music and Other Departments?

Roby Abraham’s score is a tad too indulgent and on the face, as if it desperately wants the viewer to respond to a scene in a particular way. Despite the intimate, domestic setting, the cinematography, by Arun Kumar Pandey, is visually pleasing. While the ideas behind each of the episodes are intriguing, one wonders if better editing could have minimised the redundancy in the storytelling. The costumes and production design are apt for the ambience.

Highlights?

Good casting, performances

Tackles relevant themes, issues sensitively

The smart structuring of episodes

Drawbacks?

Brevity in treatment, over-explains everything

Redundancy in storytelling, gets tiring after a point

The obsession to explain everything through backstories

Did I Enjoy It?

In parts

Will You Recommend It?

If dysfunctional family dramas are your forte, give it a try

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 Perfect Family OTT Series Review by M9