‘City of Dreams’ season 3 review: Political drama is running out of ways to deliver the shocks

Two middle-aged politicians are in bed. “Do you want to be Prime Minister?” he asks her. “No, I want power without scrutiny,” she replies. Does he want to be PM? He says no with a smile and she calls him a liar. As if the PM’s position is a passing-the-parcel game that anyone can play!

This bizarre scene takes place in the third season of Nagesh Kukunoor’s politics-for-dummies series City Of Dreams, which pretty much said what it had to say in season 1 – politicians will stop at nothing, including fratricide, to grab power.

In the first season, Poornima Gaikwad (Priya Bapat) had wrested the chair of the Chief Minister of Maharashtra by killing her brother, while her father, Ameya (Atul Kulkarni), recovered from an assassination attempt. Season 2 introduced a smorgasbord of unsavoury characters and ended with the death of Poornima’s young son in a bomb blast. A few of these characters return in the new season, but are reduced to padding as useless as packing beans, simply to extend the show to nine episodes.

Poornima is so distraught at her son’s death that she vanishes, leaving her father to defend the fort from the in-house termite Jagdish (Sachin Pilgaonkar) and Vibha (Divya Seth Shah), the scorned...

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