An official adaptation of the English show Revenge, the first season of Karmma Calling follows the story of a young woman who decides to avenge her father’s death while buying a plush mansion in Alibagh and attempting to punish the perpetrators. As they say, Revenge is a dish best served cold but this idiom was probably taken a little too seriously by its makers. Hence, the story here is so drag and drousy that it never really takes off with the revenge plot. Yes, along the way you see smaller pawns being punished for their actions but the big fish in the pond are still alive and kicking that didn’t sit well with me even from a writing standpoint. The screenplay standing at 7 episodes ranging from 30 odd to 40 odd minutes might not seem too long on paper but the uneventful narrative really saps your energy while you try to slog your way to the end of the season. Ideally, the plot did seem layered on paper but it lacked the urgency while never quite raising the stakes in the drama with respect to most principal characters on the show. I understand that even the original show did run through four seasons but to atleast attempt to create some interesting events along the way should have been the prime motive of the writers here. When that was clearly not the case here, you were served a dish so cold that it was merely bland and bleak to say the least. 

The drama opens with the setting of the party by giving a glimpse of all the characters without quite giving away their motivations or the baggages that they might be carrying to that point. This was an interesting start given that a person is murdered but this incident that potentially was used as a foreshadow never really returns in the entire season. That for me was a huge flaw wherein you can’t expect the viewers to return to that event in the subsequent seasons. Almost immediately after this incident, the show shifts timelines to the past wherein you are introduced to the protagonist who is keen on buying a property in Alibagh. In a series of quick flashbacks, you get a fair idea that this is a regular revenge drama. Now imagine this – had you held back the information while absolutely not justifying the actions of the protagonist, wouldn’t the mystery in the drama still have been alive? This was the second major flaw on revealing too much too early to the viewers that made me instantly lose interest in the drama. 

Now when too much information is already revealed at the start, it is the prerogative of the writers to create some interesting moments that would pique the interests of the viewers. But unfortunately, the drama here is so predictable and so drab that I just wasn’t connected to it at all. The entire setting of the events transpiring in the elite society was alright but it did nothing in adding any layers to the drama. In fact, the revenge plot itself seemed insipid, slowly marking the perpetrators one by one in almost one-dimensional fashion. The stakes in the drama barely rise at all even as the interpersonal relationships take center-stage. The screenplay tries to play it smart by partially opening a can of worms every now and then or even ‘trying’ to bump off a character before immediately losing the momentum on it and returning to its drab reality. The little setup at the end is decent but the writers need to be weary of adding a little more urgency in the subsequent seasons along with raising the stakes in the drama. The screenplay here is plain average.