Latest news with #MadhavMishra
India.com
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- India.com
India's most-watched OTT show: No big star, no hype, yet beats Aashram, Panchayat, Squid Game with 27.7M views
Amid big-ticket releases and franchise returns, a familiar name walked past the noise, and it's not Aashram, not Panchayat, not even the global monster Squid Game 3. It is Criminal Justice: A Family Matter on JioHotstar — featuring none other than Pankaj Tripathi as the quietly sharp Madhav Mishra. Ormax Media's Top 50 Streaming Originals list (H1 2025) placed this legal drama at the very top with 27.7 million unique viewers, making it the most-watched original OTT show across platforms. It's not Panchayat or Aashram! That's right. Jitendra Kumar's Panchayat Season 4, which had the Internet buzzing before its release, clocked 23.8 million viewers. Bobby Deol's Ek Badnaam Aashram Season 3 Part 2 did better, raking in 27.1 million. But both were still edged out by Tripathi's layered courtroom return. Criminal Justice is the only one in the top 3 with just one marquee face. No big ensemble. No viral gimmicks. Just tight storytelling, a known lawyer, and weekly episodes that kept pulling viewers back. What was new this season? Season 4 saw the return of lawyer Madhav Mishra, played by Pankaj Tripathi, as he took on another complex case involving family dynamics and layered truths. The season also starred Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Surveen Chawla, Khushboo Atre, and Asha Negi. The first three episodes dropped on May 29, 2025, and the rest followed weekly. How were the rankings calculated? Ormax's rankings were based on actual individual viewers, not account logins or views. For shows, at least one full episode needed to be watched. For films, a minimum of 30 minutes. And repeat viewing? Doesn't count. One viewer, one count. That makes these numbers more human than just 'stream counts.' What about the rest of the Top 10? Here's how the race shaped up: Criminal Justice S4 – 27.7 million Ek Badnaam Aashram S3 Part 2 – 27.1 million Panchayat S4 – 23.8 million Paatal Lok (Amazon Prime Video) – 16.8 million Squid Game S3 (Netflix) – 16.5 million The Legend of Hanuman S6 – 16.2 million The Royals – 15.5 million The Secret of the Shieldars – 14.5 million Chidiya Udd – 13.7 million Jewel Thief – 13.1 million Why did Criminal Justice click? Season 4 avoided the usual traps — no unnecessary twists, no dragged-out drama. Just Madhav Mishra doing what he does best — defending the flawed, exposing the hidden, and still managing to smile through chaos.
Indian Express
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Sameer Nair feels Indian adaptation of The Office would do far better today: ‘Market was smaller then, wanted to do 11 seasons like US'
Sameer Nair enjoys a unique lens on the Indian entertainment landscape. From his first stint at Star when nascent Indian television was opening its arms to shows from the West to now adapting successful series from around the world into enduring Indian originals, he's come a long way. In an exclusive interview with SCREEN, the Managing Director of Applause Entertainment talks about the current streaming scene, adapting shows from Indian books and shows in other languages, and navigating the algorithm of a range of OTT platforms. Pankaj Tripathi told us he's been showing off that Criminal Justice started as an adaptation in India, but has now taken a life of its own. It has outlasted its original British version by two seasons. How did you achieve that? At that time, we'd seen both the original British version and the American adaptation, The Night Of. It was a very strong, powerful show, so we got the rights. We were working with BBC as they were trying to pitch it in India. We stayed true to both the shows. There's a lawyer character in both, who's a bit morose, eccentric, down on his luck, like a loser. We wrote the character in a similar manner. We made a few changes to the story for India. We didn't make our central character Muslim. We made him into a Hindu boy so that it becomes really middle-of-the-plate. It could happen to anyone. So we cast (Vikrant Massey) around it. The happy surprise of season 1 was that when Pankaj brought on the lawyer's role and started essaying it, he brought a mischief to Madhav Mishra. That was not there in either of the shows. He wasn't funny or smiling. We quite liked that. The Americans never did season 2, only the British did. But when we were doing season 2, we decided to take the Madhav Mishra forward, but stick to the original story of that season. By season 3, we'd got our own Lincoln Lawyer going. Pankaj has also come into his own. It's a character he lives and owns. Interestingly enough, the character remains the humble everyman desi guy. He's not become arrogant. At a time when streaming is facing challenges at multiple levels, do you think adapting a show and building an original franchise out of it is the way to go? It's being done. We ourselves have done Tanaav (on SonyLIV), which has been adapted from Fauda (Israeli show on Netflix). We did Your Honor (SonyLIV), another Israeli show, which was later done in America with Bryan Cranston. So, adapting is a common enough thing in the whole world. There's nothing new with it. Vishal Bhardwaj has made a whole range of Shakespeare stories (Maqbool, Omkara, Haider). Martin Scorsese has won his only Academy Award for The Departed (2006), which is an adaptation of the Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs (2002). There are some stories in a particular context and language, that have a certain core, which should be told again in different places, worlds, milieus, and cultures. We used to rip it off earlier. Now, we get the legitimate rights. The only way you can keep stories and morals of those stories alive is by retelling them. You can't tell a human a story once and expect generations to remember it. That's why the Ramayana and the Mahabharata keep getting remade with new interpretations. It's not a formula, it's just a good thing to do. Along with Criminal Justice, you also adapted The Office in 2020. Do you think that couldn't sustain because of the high recall value that the American version has till today? No, I think we did a really good job. The British made 18 episodes, the Americans made 187 episodes! I love the Americans for that, they really take things ahead. We made a good two seasons. Maybe at that time, the market was much smaller. Today, now that you have 300 million customers on JioHotstar, The Office will do really well. The team keeps calling me and asking when we're going to do season 3 because even the version we made was really liked. A show that was set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is outside New York, we based it in Faridabad, but it still works. A sleepy office with nobody working, a crazy boss — it's a universal emotion. Even Gopal Dutt's character, with all his quirks, really took off! I feel bad we didn't do more of it. We also wanted to do 11 seasons. You also adapted Idris Elba's Luther into Rudra: The Edge of Darkness with Ajay Devgn in 2022. Do you think a star of his stature hasn't worked in a show before and since because the economics of that doesn't work out on streaming? Yes, I think so. When it released, it was a blowout hit. It was really successful, the most watched show on Hotstar till now, when Criminal Justice season 4 has come along. But now, you're talking about JioHotstar, it's a much bigger base. Rudra was really big for its time. It's the economics, the ROI, it was also early days of streaming, there are moving parts to this. Ajay did a fantastic job. He's a great actor. Like Luther, we got the edge about Rudra right. Ajay had already seen that show and loved it, so he wanted it to work. Aamir Khan recently argued while adapting the 2018 Spanish film Campeones into Sitaare Zameen Par that not a lot of Indians would watch the original Spanish movie. Do you think it benefits you more if you adapt from an Israeli show, as opposed to an English show, since English is a far more accessible language in India? I think it's the same. Streaming is everywhere now, and the audience is happily consuming content in other languages also. When you adapt something, you're not doing just because no one else has seen it here. Of course, a smaller audience has seen it, and there's still a larger one available to see it. But you also adapt because you believe it's a story that must be retold, in you own way. We've done adaptations of obscure shows, like Mithya (2022, ZEE5) made from Australian show called Cheat. But no one has seen it, forget just the English-speaking audience. But it's a story worthy of retelling and it's resonated with audiences everywhere. You have also adapted books, like Scam 1992 (adapted from Sucheta Dalal and Debashish Basu's book The Scam: Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Away) and Black Warrant (adapted from Sunetra Choudhury and Sunil Kapoor's 2019 book). Do you think streaming and creators aren't banking enough on the rich Indian literature we have out there? Well, we are. We're doing quite a bit of these. Like our recent SonyLIV show, Nagesh Kukunoor's The Hunt – The Rajiv Gandhi Assassination Case is adapted from Anirudhya Mitra's book Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi's Assasins, which was written just one-and-a-half years ago. It's important to tell stories of contemporary history. A lot of the mythology and historicals you see on Indian streaming these days are also based on some book or similar source material. But when you're adapting it, you don't have to copy it verbatim. For example, when we did Scam 1992, we called it specifically The Harshad Mehta Story. Because it was a much wider book. It becomes hard to go as wide in a series so we focused on one part of it. If you want to know about the whole scam, go read the book. The third season of Scam is based on the late Sahara chief Subroto Roy. Since you were in the same industry as him, have you had any personal interactions with him? I think everybody has. We'll be hard-pressed to find a single human being who hasn't interacted with him. But again, it's a very fascinating story. We don't approach stories like these in a scandalous or malicious way. The core of that franchise is that there are really smart, intelligent, ambitious people who are often failed by the system so they bend that system and achieve a lot till they fly too close to the sun. So we're always interested in telling human stories, what was happening in India in their time, what made them do what they did, how they did it. Did you expect Vikramaditya Motwane's Black Warrant to break out like it did and get renewed for another season? We worked really hard on it. But the real validation came from the audience. If I try to explain the show, it'd seem like it's about the dark underbelly of Tihar Jail. But what we were making was a young adult workplace drama. It's just not Procter & Gamble, it's Tihar Jail. They're not MBAs, they just come from different backgrounds. Creators are often telling stories in a particular way, but it's only when the audience syncs that you make magic. We live a very dangerous life in our business. You've also adapted Ramachandra Guha's books for Hansal Mehta and Prateik Gandhi's show on Mahatma Gandhi. What new would these series offer than what we've already seen in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982)? Attenborough's Gandhi is just three hours long. But you're telling a full life, and what a life! That film doesn't even have Subhash Chandra Bose and BR Ambedkar as characters. It's obviously iconic, a great movie for its time, and put India on the world map. But we believe the series format allows us to tell a richer story, to talk about what was going around at that time. It's not a fair comparison, but this is like our Crown. In 2-3 seasons, we aim to tell the story of Gandhi, of our Independence struggle, and of all the people who were involved in it, and not just Gandhi. Obviously, he becomes a name to symbolize it with because he's the guy on our currency notes, but there were so many people who worked with him on all sides, whether for or against. Then of course, as like with any story, with a historical also, you can reinterpret it for a new audience. Again, Gandhi is like a young adult story. It's not that old man you see with a shawl and a stick. This is a young guy who goes to London to study. He's actually India's first NRI since he stayed in South Africa for 25 years and then came back to India. Nowadays, they work in Silicon Valley and then come back to India, like Swades (2004) was. Also Read — Kaun Banega Crorepati turns 25: 'Show endured because Amitabh Bachchan stayed loyal to it, Star cancelled it after Shah Rukh Khan's season,' recalls Sameer Nair Since you've worked with a range of Indian streaming platforms, how do you wrap your head around the algorithms of each? Actually, a lot of this is also a little bit of common sense and a little bit of common knowledge. Usually, when people tend to like one kind of show, they tend to like more of the same. That's why there's that icon which says, 'You May Also Like.' Franchises like Criminal Justice work well because you've primed the audience for the kind of stories, characters, and adventures. They almost market themselves, like superhero movies. In terms of genre, there are some which may work better than the other, but we don't break our shows into genres. All shows are dramas. They're human beings interacting with each other. For instance, this is an interview. But if you shoot me, it becomes a crime drama. Everyone loves crime because that's one thing you're too scared to do yourself. So there's a voyeuristic feel to it. You're always drawn to seeing someone else commit a crime. Then you look for closure in the form of justice. So you like crime because you can't do it.
Time of India
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Criminal Justice season 4 ending leaves viewers stunned: The twist no one saw coming sparks storm of reactions online
If there's one thing the finale of Criminal Justice Season 4 proved, it's that no one really saw it coming. Released a day earlier than usual on July 3, the much-anticipated climax of the legal thriller took viewers on an emotional rollercoaster, leaving them stunned and, quite literally, speechless. What followed was a full-blown internet meltdown — from breathless praise to meme explosions, the finale became an instant sensation. Veteran lawyer Madhav Mishra, played with effortless gravitas by Pankaj Tripathi , returns to the courtroom battlefield in what is arguably his most morally complicated case yet. As the plot unfolds, viewers are drawn into the murky depths of a family's breakdown, where love, guilt, illness, and justice collide in heartbreaking ways. The show's gripping narrative, centred around the murder of nurse Roshni Saluja, reveals not just a legal puzzle but an emotional conundrum that tests every character involved. — kush1724 (@kush1724) A Finale That Left Everyone Guessing; and Guessing Wrong Social media has erupted in unison over the shocking final twist — a revelation that not only upended the murder mystery but challenged notions of justice and sacrifice. "Mind blown," "Did NOT see that coming," and "Best Indian thriller ever" were just some of the hundreds of reactions pouring in across Twitter (now X), Reddit, and Instagram. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Buy One, Get One Free, Up To 50% Discount, Expiring Soon Original Adidas Shop Now Undo — wakil_saheeba (@wakil_saheeba) — Shuk_law_ (@Shuk_law_) And then came the memes — thousands of them. From 'MIND BLOWN' GIFs to netizens captioning Madhav Mishra's moral dilemma with existential humour, the finale has given meme-makers enough content to last till the next season drops. — jaisantoshhhhh (@jaisantoshhhhh) — OfficialAayushi (@OfficialAayushi) A Legacy of Twists The Criminal Justice franchise has earned its stripes over the years with layered storytelling and rich performances. While previous seasons featured names like Vikrant Massey, Kirti Kulhari, and Jackie Shroff, this time it's the emotional depth of Surveen Chawla and Zeeshan Ayyub's performances that tugged at the audience's heartstrings. In conversation with India Today, Pankaj Tripathi had joked that the series changed his life — and for fans, this season changed their expectations. The creators pulled off a finale that dared to go beyond a whodunit, opting instead for a why-did-they-do-it and who-will-live-with-it narrative arc. While the show draws no hard conclusions on guilt, it does leave the viewer grappling with human fragility, love, and justice. The decision by Madhav Mishra in the closing moments not only redefines his character but adds philosophical weight to the entire season. It's less about courtroom wins and more about moral reckoning.
Time of India
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
‘Criminal Justice Season 4' Episode 8, X Review: Pankaj Tripathi's series finale impresses the audience; Netizens believe it lived up to the standards
Pankaj Tripathi in 'Criminal Justice' Pankaj Tripathi and his thriller series ' Criminal Justice Season 4 ' have been the talk of the town right from the word go. Now, with the release of its finale, episode 8, it has once again set the internet abuzz. Netizens have hailed the show for its unexpected ending, intriguing climax, and they are singing praises for Pankaj Tripathi, aka. Madhav Mishra . Criminal Justice Season 4, Episode 8 - X Review Appreciating the finale, one post read - "What an unexpected ending of #CriminalJusticeSeason4! The series lived up to the standards it set. Hats off to Story writer as well as Screenplay writer". Another fan wrote, "Just watched #CriminalJusticeSeason4 - finally, the best one since Season 1! The climax was beautifully crafted, truly showcasing why this series deserves special applause Brilliant direction that gives justice to every perspective. Absolutely loved it!" by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Ada jeragat, terus nampak tua! Minum ni je, beli kat Guardian URUHIME MOMOKO Undo Another tweet mentioned - '#CriminalJusticeSeason4 really matches the standards it has set for previous 3 seasons. Brilliant writing and everything.. can't blame hotstar to treat it as cash machine releasing only epsiode per week but anyway strongly recommended top tier show.' Netizens also hailed Surveen Chawla for her character of Anu Nagpal . Many even called her the real hero of the show. "Anju Nagpal is the real Hero of #CriminalJusticeSeason4. She showed what a mother can do for the future of her Kids. Finally, Madhav Mishra won the case but lost against a mother," mentioned a user. "What a finale! #CriminalJusticeSeason4 lives up to the hype with a phenomenal episode 8. @SurveenChawla amazing as always!" - read another post. 'Criminal Justice: A Family Matter' 'Criminal Justice' is loosely adapted from Peter Moffat 's 2008 BBC series. Directed by Rohan Sippy , the legal drama has been headlined by Pankaj Tripathi, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Surveen Chawla, Khushboo Atre, and Asha Negi. The eight-episode-long series was packed with twists and turns, surprises and more. Speaking about the series, Asha Negi, in an interview with Filmibeat shared why she came onboard, 'There were a lot of it's such a huge franchise, of course it has such phenomenal actors, then I think the character i'm playing, Roshni, that character i felt was quiet challenging. It was layered, and it was not an easy one to play, which was why I had a lot of fun."
Time of India
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Criminal Justice season 4 finale set for July 3: Will Pankaj Tripathi aka Madhav Mishra finally crack the case?
The courtroom drama that has kept India on edge is nearing its final verdict. Criminal Justice: A Family Matter , the fourth season of the acclaimed legal thriller, will air its final episode soon. With the mystery of nurse Roshni Saluja's murder still unresolved, fans are expecting a dramatic conclusion. A season of secrets, lies, and legal twists Starring Pankaj Tripathi as the ever-resourceful lawyer Madhav Mishra, Season 4 has plunged viewers into a tangled web of family secrets and courtroom intrigue. The case revolves around Dr. Raj Nagpal, who is accused of murdering his girlfriend Roshni, a nurse, while his estranged wife Anju and daughter Ira are caught in the emotional crossfire. Each episode has unveiled new layers of the case, with Episode 7 ending on a suspenseful note involving a random lactose-free milk bottle and a new piece of evidence that might change everything. When and where to watch A recent Wikipedia edit mistakenly led fans to believe the finale had already aired on June 26. However, the show's creators clarified that Episode 7 was released on that date. The actual finale, Episode 8, will stream at midnight on July 3, 2025, exclusively on JioHotstar. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Free P2,000 GCash eGift UnionBank Credit Card Apply Now Undo What to expect With Madhav Mishra's legal team closing in on the truth and public speculation running wild, the finale promises to deliver high-stakes drama and long-awaited answers. The key questions remain: Will justice be served? Or will the truth remain buried beneath layers of privilege and manipulation? About the show Criminal Justice is an adaptation of the acclaimed 2008 British series of the same name. Written by Shridhar Raghavan and directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia and Vishal Furia, the Indian version delves deep into the complex, emotional, and often harrowing journey of individuals caught in the country's criminal justice system. The series made its debut on April 5, 2019, on Hotstar and was instantly praised for its intense storytelling and powerful performances. Featuring a cast that includes Vikrant Massey, Jackie Shroff, Anupriya Goenka, and Mita Vashisht, with Pankaj Tripathi leading as the protagonist, Criminal Justice has resonated strongly with both audiences and critics.
