Aarya Season 3: How Sushmita Sen returns in the most significant role of her career

In many ways, being Aarya on screen has paralleled Sushmita Sen’s career graph lately. Just as her protagonist Aarya Sareen starts off in the streaming show, the actress herself was happy leading a life far from the spotlight when things took a dramatic turn post the show’s release. If the fictional world of Aarya was thrown into a frenzy soon after the story took off, the overnight success of season one in 2020 brought a rush back into Sen’s work life, too.

Sushmita Sen’s return to screen in the first season of the Ram Madhvani show ended up as one of the most remarkable comebacks for any Bollywood actress in recent years. Now, as season three drops in OTT zone this weekend, the stakes are higher. If Aarya Sareen, who spectacularly transformed from an upper-class homemaker and mother of three to a don over two seasons, is out to consolidate her turf in the grimy world of crime this time, the focus for Sen will be to prove her comeback bid was no one-off affair.

For the sake of Madhvani and team, it will be important for Sen to click once again in season three. So far, the show, adapted from the Dutch series Penoza, has mostly banked on her statuesque screen presence for a bailout every time it got stuck in the rut of boredom or predictability. Alternating between being a wife in shock, a mother who’d go to any extent to protect her children, and a woman who must quickly learn the ropes to deal with the men who run the underworld, Sen as Aarya has given the series most of its defining moments.

Aarya’s story has been a winner despite overriding clichés because, so far, the show has managed to balance the melodramatic demands of a family soap with the set-piece thriller quotient of a crime drama. If the focus to create a suitable author backed premise for Sushmita Sen is obvious, the actress has made the most of the opportunity. Not only has Aarya Sareen emerged as her career-best performance, the show in spite of its warts has given Indian OTT one of its most remarkable female protagonists. It is a reason Aarya has managed to garner a loyal fan base.

Aarya Season 3 is slated to pick up the story soon after the incidents of its preceding season, just as season two had started off exactly at the point where the first one had ended. For Madhvani and co-creator Sandeep Modi, season two would definitely seem like a weak follow-up of a show that had started off as an interesting concept. Through almost all of its eight episodes, which dropped in December 2021, the decision to produce season two seemed commercial rather than creative, simply because following up a hit first season has lucrative logic. The story meandered aimlessly and a plot that unfolded through eight episodes could have been contained in less than half of that runtime. The saving grace of season two, Sen’s performance apart, had been the season finale. The writers (Sanyuktha Chawla Shaikh and Anu Singh Choudhary) managed to conjure magic in the final episode as protagonist Aarya Sareen ultimately came of age as an antihero.

The brilliant finale of the otherwise forgettable second season raised expectations when it dropped two years ago, and excitement was naturally building around an impending season three among hardcore fans ever since it was announced. Madhvani, Modi and company have ensured that the plot of the new season stays under wraps. For the charm of Aarya to work again, a shock factor will have to be sustained as she goes about fending against fresh challenges as a don and a mother.

So far, here’s what we know. In season one, Sushmita Sena as Aarya Sareen starts off as a happily married woman and caring mother whose life is thrown into chaos when her husband Tej (Chandrachur Singh) is killed. Aarya is in for the shock of her life when she discovers that the pharmaceutical firm Tej co-owned with partners was actually a cover-up for their drug-running trade. For reasons she will eventually find out, the cartels and the underworld now want to eliminate Aarya as well as her family. In a frantic move to protect her children, Aarya chooses to join the underworld. As she morphs from a contended homemaker to a gangster, the desire to avenge her husband’s death grows stronger, too. While season one ended with Aarya fleeing the country with her kids for the sake of their safety, the second season saw her returning to India to testify in court. The season tried setting up suspense drama through the revelation of her father and her clash with the ruthless Russian mob, but half-baked writing and execution came in the way of great entertainment. With season three, Sushmita Sen would hope to end proceedings on the same high that the culmination of the earlier seasons one saw. The series, however, is equally significant for creator Ram Madhvani.

Madhvani, who has had a successful stint as an ad-filmmaker, made his directorial debut around two decades ago with the English language Indian film Let’s Talk (Boman Irani’s first film as a leading man). He has helmed just two feature films in all these years — Neerja featuring Sonam Kapoor in 2016 and the Kartik Aaryan-starrer Dhamaka in 2021 — besides a couple of acclaimed shorts. Aarya has been the most mainstream among all his directorial attempts, and has seen Madhvani take ample creative liberties to push the drama and occasional action. In season three, he would want to get rid of the unnecessarily tendency to stretch storytelling that hampered the last season, or pen corny dialogues for the sake of heightening melodrama. Arya Sareen’s story could go on into a possible season four, and it would surely be a delight to see Sushmita Sen return in her fiery avatar. Or, for the sake of an impact that only brevity can render, it could end while the going is still good.

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and journalist who loves to write on popular culture.