There is so much ridiculousness going on in Season 2 of Mumbai Diaries that one almost forgets how (semi) watchable the first season was. Released in the middle of the pandemic, Season 1 — that focused on a team of diligent but ill-equipped medical professionals trying to stay afloat in the middle of the carnage of 26/11 that brought Mumbai to its knees as well as deal with internal and personal conflicts — felt instantly relevant and timely, even if it didn’t make for very good filmmaking.
Season 2, arriving exactly two years after the first, focuses on another Mumbai ‘event’ — the 26/7 deluge of 2005. The series — directed by Nikkhil Advani and streaming on Prime Video — for better or for worse, benefited from the inherent edge-of-the-seat DNA of its story. Focusing on the killer rains that ravaged the city and almost tore it apart, Season 2 has another Mumbai tragedy to focus on, but it fictionalises a large part of the story.
Which isn’t a bad thing if Advani and co-writer Sanyukta Chawla Shaikh had kept their focus on bringing stories, catalysed by the deluge, of both hope and hopelessness on screen. Instead, Mumbai Diaries 2 is a wasted exercise of eight episodes that seems hellbent on degenerating into a soap opera, what they make their primary focus is the drama inside the hospital and mostly connected to the personal lives of its characters.
In fact, it seems that Season 2 has a checklist at hand to tick off. So there is a homosexuality/ transition angle. A domestic abuse subplot. A TV news morality debate. A love triangle. A thread involving abuse of delinquents in a juvenile home. Marital and relationship conflict. Illegal selling of medicinal drugs. And much more. While the series could have packed in all of these plots and threads as a metaphor for the destruction of lives both inside and outside, it fails to do so. Instead, what we get is a story with a lot of potential and quite a few performances that impress, but the two don’t coalesce to make a logical and cohesive whole.
Unfolding in the same Bombay General Hospital which bore the brunt of 26/11 but held fort with fortitude in the face of extreme danger and even death, Season 2 of Mumbai Diaries takes a while to build its drama. It takes the creative licence of showing the events of Season 2 unfolding a few months after 26/11, when in reality, 26/7 happened three years earlier.
Even as the city is ravaged by incessant rain, the hospital — already chock-a-block and firefighting against crises at every step — finds itself in the middle of multiple emergencies, with personal and professional conflicts playing out simultaneously.
There is trauma surgeon Kaushik Oberoi (Mohit Raina) who is staring at a possible cancellation of his medical licence after being dragged to court for the seemingly negligent death of a top cop. The hospital’s admin Chitra Das (Konkona Sensharma) has to deal with the demons in her past when her estranged abusive husband (played by Parambrata Chattopadhyay) lands up as a doctor in the hospital. The junior doctors each have their own problems to deal with. It’s one problem too many and while the same structure seemed kind of organic in Season 1 before exploding with the events of 26/11, most of it in the second season comes off as messy and melodramatic masala.
It is also painfully predictable. There are numerous mentions of Mumbai’s ubiquitous ‘spirit’ in the face of tragedy that makes it spring back on its feet ever so often. The shrillness of Indian TV news debates and the morality vs ethics angle embodied by 26/11 star anchor Mansi Hirani (Shreya Dhanwanthary) is one that we have seen a million times before.
While some parts of the series — Chitra’s blow-hotblow-cold dynamic with her husband — keep you engaged, Advani makes sure that even that thread becomes unwatchable after a point. A murder attempt in the middle of a hospital and a scene towards the end where fine actors like Konkona and Parambrata are made to look absurd, with one trying to kidnap another in full public view, undo most of the (rare) good work that this season still managed to pack in. And that includes a poignant moment between Oberoi and his wife Ananya which is sure to bring a lump to your throat.
In the end, Mumbai Diaries 2 is a wasted exercise of eight episodes that seems hell bent on degenerating into a soap opera. They should have just left the good memories of the first season stay with the viewer.
