Tripling season 3 review: A bittersweet but entertaining third instalment

In a scene from Tripling ’s (Zee5) third season, Chitwan (Amol Parashar) returns dejected to a camp site. “Baba can I get a hug,” Chitwan says dejectedly, to a surprised Chandan (Sumeet Vyas). It’s a terrific scene that highlights how despite many ups and downs, creative missteps and a whole streaming evolution later, one of internet’s most popular shows remains watchable not because it is creatively prudent, but because it continues to be emotionally resonant. The three siblings return for a third season, and this time it’s their parents who, kind of, need them. The template is similar to the breakthrough first season, but this time round nostalgia and familial tensions cut across forgotten generational lines. It may not always be convincing, at least for a handful of unreal setups and segues the series indulges but Tripling’s third season is evidence, yet again of TVF’s ability to draw emotion out of the ordinary. We start this season with the three siblings being told that their parents are separating. Each busy in their own personal lives, the three decide to take a trip to a vague place in the hills (in the first season it was Manali). Tripling has always returned to the lives of its three protagonists at different points in their life. Here, Chandan is going through a downturn in his writing career, Chitwan is homeless and Chanchal has become burdened with the weight of living as royalty i.e. they bring their own baggage on the trip. And that is kind of the point of this entire season that unfurls rather quickly through 25-min episodes. Back home the three siblings realise a lot has happened while they have been away, and not all of it is to their personal agreement. The show’s second season was a quirky but ultimately baffling exercise in abandoning the show’s key strengths – the familial bond at the heart of this family. This third season is like a literal and metaphoric homecoming to the things that made Tripling what it is – an unlikely dramedy about a family that though not estranged, has forgotten how it feels to live together. This season doesn’t exactly push the envelope but it does reveal a new weapon in its armoury of modesty. Amol Parashar, previously the jester becomes the show’s focal point, a sombre study in loneliness and isolation. His transformation from the kooky, wanton playboy from the first season to the reluctant adult is a thud to the chest of emotion that the series unloads in its last two episodes. While Parashar anchors this third season, Kumud Mishra lends it its heft. Is there a better actor at romance in this country at the moment than Mishra? He is loveable, charming, and in one cathartic argument ahead of the climax, mesmeric. The parents in Tripling have always been liberal cosmonauts watching over their flawed children from the distance of space. But in this seasons their aloofness takes on new measures, in a somewhat unlikely, but still believable direction. This is TVF almost undoing the ills of Baghban, returning agency to the parental figure, who in this context come across as the youngest people around. Maybe that is what experience does to you, by teaching you to let go of that which you cannot hold onto. This third season despite its short runtime has its problems. Both Chanchal ( Maanvi Gagroo ) and Chandan are mere accessories, unable to grasp at conflicts that are their own to resolve. Kunal Roy Kapoor is charming and watchable as the returning Pranav, but isn’t really allowed to summon anything other than his ungainly habitual laziness or his royal patronage. In comparison, Prashar is allowed the kind of leg room that he simply hasn’t in the previous seasons as some sort of karmic justice for continuously punching above the quotient of entertainment this series would have otherwise struggled for. This is possibly his most popular role (despite playing Bhagat Singh in Sardar Udham) yet and here he qualifies his brilliance with something beyond quantity and quirky. Tripling is the kind of breezy storytelling that makes for entertainment but not necessarily relevance in a literary sense. It clutches at woke ideas, cooks up convenient epiphanies and is far too dry at times, to sustain a story that is much more than a series of chaotic, bucket-list events. It’s far too goofy at times to be taken seriously, evidenced possibly by the fact that each of its three seasons have now streamed on three different platforms. The second season had pretty much gutted the good faith the show had earned with its first, but in this third outing, it returns to what it knows best – family. Unsurprisingly, the creators have realised that the series was never about the tumult of the unlikely journey, but the friction of that which was familiar. Siblings, parents, and lives unimaginable without the memory of the other.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.