For some odd reason, Amazon Prime’s new drama Made In Heaven kept reminding me of the USA series Suits.
Except that Made In Heaven, which becomes available Friday, revolves around wedding planners instead of lawyers. Turns out they don’t require as different a skillset as one might think.
Karan (Arjun Mathur) and Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala) recently co-founded Made In Heaven, a high-end outfit that aims to serve wealthy Indian families. Presumably, because that’s where the money is.
Karan and Tara themselves aren’t exactly a traditional Indian match.
Karan seems like the perfect compliant Indian son. He’s unfailingly deferential to his parents, nice people who mostly want their son to find the right Indian woman and use his company’s own service.
That’s more of a long-shot than they realize since Karan is gay. That being a crime in India, he has remained discreet enough that his parents and presumably most of his clients don’t know.
Tara, meanwhile, climbed the challenging Indian social ladder by escaping from the wrong side of the tracks and marrying the wealthy Adil Khanna (Jim Sarbh). It’s not a marriage made in heaven, though it mostly seems to suit both their purposes at the moment.
Those personal undercurrents bubble throughout the show, which might be called a wedding procedural. Most weeks Karan and Tara tackle a new wedding with a unique set of challenges, which is where the Suits comparison kicks in.
Suits starts with the idea that a bunch of people we mostly like find ways to get around the constant obstacles presented by life and human nature. They aren’t always perfectly ethical or gentle, but in the end, they usually find ways to push their team over the goal line.
Tara, Karan, and their staff have that same quality. The minute it looks like something can’t be done, one of them finds a way to do it.
That premise works particularly well because Indian weddings are presented as ordinations from the gods. The name Made in Heaven didn’t only come from the marketing department. That’s how weddings are seen: how the gods link the right two people together.
Which doesn’t mean that well-meaning friends and family don’t get to ask whether this is what the gods really intended.
In the first episode, the son and sole heir of a wealthy family, Angad Roshan (Pavail Gulati), tells his parents he wants to marry a journalist of common birth, Aliya Saxena (Aditi Joshi).
Much drama ensues as Angad’s mother, convinced Aliya is digging for gold rather than stories, tries to find a wedge that will drive them apart.
Cue the persuasive mediation skills of Tara and Karan.
Made In Heaven acknowledges serious issues of Indian society, including the rigid class system, the growing power of women, and contemporary pressures to ease conservative social policies. It’s sprinkled with ethnic and other references that will resonate with Indian audiences and may mean little to outsiders.
Still, in the end, it’s relatively light stuff, a familiar multiple-crisis drama in a less familiar setting.