P.I. Meena

Based in the city of joy Kolkata, PI Meena is helmed by Arindam Mitra and Debaloy Bhattacharya together, as a tale of a professional investigator who witnesses an accident of an unknown person in broad daylight and the consequences she faces thereafter, forms the rest of the story.

The story builds episode by episode with the help of a dark environment which sets the mood of the narration.

The series maintains a continuous pace throughout.

Some good conceptualization has been made out of Covid 19 and it has been camouflaged with a socio political angle intelligently.

Like other web series in recent times, this one too has some characters with their individual sub plots. But a major weakness of the script is that these sub plots either lack proper conclusion or few things remain unexplained even at the end.

Camera work of the series is adequate and dialogues are well written. Editing is a portion where some more or better work was required.

Debaloy Bhattacharya has directed well apart from some minor flourishes. A better version is expected out of him for the next season.

Coming down to performances- Tanya Maniktala carries the show on her shoulders ably, despite the flaws in the script. She is absolutely natural as the investigator. Her character being the central one, more dimensions to it would have made her role more impactful.

Parambrata as usual has played his part well enough as the lawyer. His track too needed some meat for having a stronger impact on the story.

Jishu Sengupta is fantastic as the doctor out of every scope he has received to perform. He shines in every scene, be it conversation with anyone else or the action sequence.

Among the rest- Vinay Pathak, Vipin Sharma, Harsh Chhaya, Samir Soni, Saurav Das, Zarina Wahab and others have played their part well. Each one of their stories needed a proper explanation which is unfortunately missing.

All in all it can be a weekend watch with not very high expectations.

As mentioned before. A better Season 2 can be expected from the talented Team of Arindam, Debaloy, Parambrata and Tanya besides others.....

Quite a wonder cast put together.. This has to my search of the year so far & my favourite next to Jubilee for the sheer love for the genre.

Tanya portraying a character who doesn't have that wide smile that she's known for was brilliant. She knows her job & her body language, walk, mannerisms were quite spot on.

She keeps the ticker on & so does Parambrata.

Absolutely Loved Zarina Wahab ji - what an actress, her accent, small gestures of "Kee", how she handles the mobile to search for contact - OMG!

Loved the cinematography, music & costumes.

But biggest winner has to be the narrative style - the director knows his job & how to get the detective feeling going.

The scenes are really good. Scenes from Kolkata to North Bengal all are very good with nice color grading. But the story is very boring. Poorly written. The videography is not that good at all. Poorly integrated. All the cast members are so much talented. They act and perform exceptionally.

They acted very good in this series too but the story and integration is missing. Not properly collaborated and the scenes will look like very discreet and from another series or movies with no continuity.

I think Amazon need to appoint better director and crew like Koushik for their series or movies.

That'll be super hit.

As someone who follows content on Amazon Prime, I was quite impressed by the trailer of PI Meena and really looking forward to what the show would entail. Watched it on the day of release and the first episode definitely tested my patience (the intelligent casting helped here though). The story picks pace as you sit through it watching Ep2 and 3 , and totally gets you wanting to know more as you move beyond Ep4 n 5. The writing is crisp and justifies the actions of a young detective who is dealing with a devastating personal past yet trying to make it through her challenging profession. The Bengali actors justify their parts and the Deadly Virus theme conceptualized way before the Pandemic deserves all the KUDOS !

The story does leave you with some 'Why's' in the end but overall I found the series worthy of my time .

I am loathe to criticise other people's work as a lot of sweat and toil go in but the recent spate of subpar shows shows across platforms have been disheartening.

I thought Charlie Chopra was disappointing (from a Director I regard so highly) but PI Meena just broke my heart - the evident lack of effort in its writing is hard to digest and a criminal waste of resource and opportunity IMO.

In there somewhere lies a story that could have been, but it is crushed under its own sprawling ambition and inability to pull it all in cohesively in a taut narrative which is key for this genre. In a classic case of tell not show, the verbosity is tiring and needless. Meena's character quirks don't land most of the time because the character is just handed some "cool "markers but not vested with authenticity. And as lovely as Tanya Manicktala is, she isn't able to rise above the pedestrian written material.

Once again as is often the case, the writers fail to create authentic workspace dynamics - the way Meena speaks with her Boss is inexcusable, her playing truant and wasting office resources without any consequence or even a slap on her wrist - given that the agency has 2 half baked cases she can't be a star asset really - are just few of the minor points.

In spite of the dark web and virus and terror groups and agencies, the series has a very dated vibe. Meena's constant platitudinal VO is a drudge and gets in the way of the story. The crater-sized and at times improbable laugh-out-loud plot-holes don't help and some of the subplots one could have done without because they do nothing for the story, at all.

Big words are bandied about but protocols and due process (which could have aided the tautness of the narrative) are cavalierly ignored and often there's no context or logic, the series plods on flat as last year's beer with things happening conveniently because they must happen, loose ends flutter in thin air and that climax - don't get me started on the climax. The loose meandering edit really doesn't help.

One's time will be better spent watching Bengali series Indu instead (also on Prime) - made with proper intent and probably 11/3 the budget - it is an engrossing watch.