The Family Man Season 3 (2025) – Boring and Meh!

Genre: Spy Thriller

Platform: Amazon Prime

Length – 7 episodes x 58 minutes each

Writer Directors:  Raj & DK

Cast:  Manoj Bajpayee. Shareeb Hashmi. Jaideep Ahlawat. Nimrat Kaur. And all the usual ‘family members’.

Plot:   India’s North East is on boil with series of bomb explosions in Nagaland. The local leader wants that Kulkarni, the head of TASC and Shrikant Tiwari help him to bring together all the warring factions, to support PM Basu’s development plans. However, an NRI woman Meera and her boss Dwarkanath subcontract drug lord Rukma to assassinate the local leader , Kulkarni and their convoy, so that the peace plan will fail and the PM will divert development funds into buying weapons. The data forensics point to Srikant as the suspect and soon he and his family are on the run, helped by JK and a bunch of dedicated supporters inside TASC…

In one episode, Tiwari finally breaks the news to his family. The dialogues go something like this.

Tiwari: “I am an agent”.

Son: “Oh, What agent?”

Daughter: “Dumbo. He is a spy”.

Son: “Oh. Do you have a code name? Like Panther? Lion? Tiger?”

Tiwari. “I work in an intelligence agency. Not a circus”.

How one wishes that the oh-so-clever writers had stuck to this line and not made the seven episodes into one circus after another.  In the process, the rambling script, like S1 and S2, throws many ‘oh-I-am-so-clever’ points in the viewers’ face.

Consider the checklist below:

• Ordinary man and this time, his family are also in trouble.
• His wife Suchi who was in a startup firm loses her job.
• The unmarried JK is trying out marriage Apps (and we are supposed to laugh at his antics).
• The foreign woman Meera simpers and pouts while casually planning one atrocity or the other. She can even swear the worst kind of swear words to show what a bad woman she is and that’s how she wins the respect of the drug lord.
• The drug lord is really not all that evil. After all, didn’t he take care of his dead mistress’s son and even teach him to plant a bomb on the visiting PM’s public function?
• The PM is a decent sort but her cabinet is riddled with moles working for arms merchants
• The North East militants are also decent and honourable and it is their support that Tiwari wants.
• Zoya, who was injured in S1, is now back and is hotly pursuing Tiwari.
• Tiwari’s ex flame Saloni simpers and pouts but finally decides to help Tiwari and his family.
• Finally, Tiwari’s worst friend, a Tamil living at Moreh, a town 16 km from the Myanmar border helps him and this gives a chance for the writers to self-promote their “Farzi Universe”. After all, if YRF can continue to cross promote Tiger with Pathaan and Pathaan with Tiger, what’s wrong with a little harmless promotion/ self-referencing ?

There are so many strands which are all to do with a “we are clever writers who are showing you stuff that you never knew about; and so we are great’ type of showing off. There is a certain bombast to the overall storytelling that reduces the Tiwari family’s misfortunes.

Manoj Bajpayee seems to be sleepwalking through his role and his role hogs maximum screen time while all other characters including his wife are reduced to fixtures.  It is nice to see Jugal Hansraj as the ruthless businessman Dwarkanath while Nimrat Kaur as his evil fixer Meera seems to be on a roll, since this is more or less a repeat of her character from Homeland. Jaideep Ahlawat hardly scares as the drug dealer and some of his lines are in mumble mumble territory.

Oh Yes – the last shot is of Shrikant in Myanmar apparently dead and the drug dealer escaping. Pray – we do not get a Season 4. This one is good enough for us to say R.I.P.

If you don’t have anything else to do and want to kill seven hours, wondering at the ‘oh-so-clever’ writing, do watch it.

Script – 2 out of 5

Story – 2 out of 5

Direction – 3 out of 5

Photography – 3 out of 5

Total – 2.5 out of 5