Starring Shriya Pilgaonkar and Varun Mitra in the lead, director Shefali Bhushan’s recently-released web series Guilty Minds, is the first legal drama on Prime Video. It follows the journey of two young and ambitious lawyers, who often find each other at opposite ends of the law. Every episode sees the two lawyers battling it out in the courtroom over cases ranging from copyright infringement, a driverless car, Delhi roads, water shortage in Maharashtra and many more. While there has been no dearth of legal dramas, it is the authentic portrayal of the cross-examination of witnesses and the presentation of facts in the courtroom that takes the cake. Creator & director Shefali Bhushan, who comes from a family of eminent lawyers, has certainly put her legal knowledge & background into creating a web series around legal cases and its complexities.
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Shefali reveals that one of her biggest challenges while working on the series was to bring out the authenticity of the courtroom, which is often missing in Indian shows and movies. Talking about the challenges she faced while making the series, Shefali says, “We wanted to have a lot of variety because there are very different courtrooms, there are lower courts, trial courts, criminal sessions courts, civil courts, high courts and then there is the Supreme Court, and each of them looks different to one another. So therefore, we wanted to keep cases in different kinds of courts to give the viewers a flavour of how these are different. My team and production designer visited trial courts and other courts post which we tried to do the designing of the court rooms based on how they truly are.”
Shefali adds that they also shot in an actual court. She reveals, “Patiala House court is one of the courts that we shot in. It’s one of the princely houses that has been converted into a court, so it has fireplaces in the rooms. My production designer ended up building fireplaces to be placed in the court. You may not see it much but this is the little detailing that some people will notice when they look out for it and it adds to the overall authenticity.”
Directed by Shefali Bhushan, Guilty Minds also stars Namrata Sheth, Sugandha Garg, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Satish Kaushik in pivotal roles.
The legal drama, Guilty Minds is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
