Queen

It's a good try but the director was still failed to give us the originality. He missed out many things.

I watched Season 1 of Queen in orig. Tamil audio with English subtitles on MX Player.

The disclaimer prominently proclaims this to be fiction and the Director Gautam Menon in a separate interview also asserts that it is not based on any real characters :-))) Obviously one would have to be blind not to see the striking resemblance of Ramya Krishnan to JJ oooops Shakthi, Indrajith to MGR .. er GMR and Vamsi Krishna to Sobhan Babu ... Chaitanya. Whoever did the casting did a fair job. I also recollect watching the Simi Garewal interview of JJ on DD so many years ago. This series plot pivots around the interview of Shakthi the politician by a lead TV interviewer (Lillette Dubey).

But anyway, lets treat this story as out and out fiction as the production team would have it. Episode 1 portrays Shakthi as the perfect student, too goody goody and I was wondering if this series was yet another propaganda like Vivek Oberoi's Namo !!! But it is not, thank goodness as subsequent episodes make very clear.

The episodes certainly hold the interest, the acting by most is pretty good and as mentioned before, the similarity to several real incidents, people and events is for all to see. The sets are realistic and the location shots at the Gandikota canyon area are stunning. Anikha (child JJ) and Anjana JP (young JJ) are very very good. Ramya's resemblance to the former CM is remarkable. There is some lack of continuity. For example Suryakala (Sasikala) comes in all of a sudden out of the blue which can be confusing for viewers not familiar with the politics in reference.

Season 1 signs off as an open ended Ep.11 with the funeral of GMR when Shakthi realises how she is going to shape her political future.

Trust there will be a Season 2 as this is certainly an interesting 'tale' yet to be narrated. Queen is definitely one of the better recent web series.

Don't go by the overall ratings here, 170 of the 200 ratings here are manufactured by some ratings factory... all with a 10/10 rating... all with clearly robot generated usernames and the same title "queen". You can filter all the 10/10 ratings and scroll to see what I'm saying. So effectively there are only about 30 real ratings and they are not that great.

I watched the Tamil-English version of the series which seems to be the original version. All the other versions are at least partially dubbed. If you choose to do so, watch only the Tamil-English version as the dubbing in the other versions is pathetic. I started watching the Tamil version and had to quickly run and search for the original version.

Quite a realistic bit of storytelling. The larger than life characters have been humanised. We have seen these characters only in black and white but this series presents them in reasonably realistic shades of grey. Of course there is some level of dramatisation and idolatry of the protagonist. If nothing else, this series shows why Jayalalitha became what she became. Bad parenting followed by a series of betrayals throughout her life made her insecure and she grew a gigantic ego as a defense mechanism.

The series is quite difficult to watch because of two things. The first and foremost is the excruciatingly slow pace. This should've been a 6 part series and has been stretched to 11 parts. I'm grateful that this is a web series where I have the option to hit the forward button to skip. Without that option, I'd have stopped watching it after the 1st episode. The only thing that made me push on was an eagerness to see a realistic angle to the life of Jayalalitha.

The second aspect that makes it difficult to watch is the drab dialogue delivery. The dialogue scripting and delivery both are quite dull and puts you to sleep. You can keep the dialogues realistic without making them sound like a docudrama extempore. Many of the dialogues are deep and philosophical fitting the tumultuous life of Jayalalitha but a large volume of them seem unnecessary and at times repetitive.

Overall, it's a sad missed opportunity. The creators had the courage to be realistic with the potentially controversial story but lacked the imagination to make it impactful.

This is one of the best example that emphasizes - "The personality and attitude of actors matter more than the look-alike appearance in a biopic film". Director Gautam Menon has pulled off a fantastic biopic that tells the story of a female actress turned politician in a male dominated environment. The uniqueness of the plot lies in portrayal of characters in a grey shade rather than as demi-god, seen usually in biopics. Ramya Krishnan fits the role as a 'T' supported by Anjana and Anikha playing the lead in younger ages. One of the best biopics I have seen after Thackeray. Must watch!!

Definitely not worth rating above 7. Still good one as a biography. Good Bgm.