JL 50 - A TV series starring Abhay Deol

 JL 50 is a commendable first attempt. This is the first time an Indian TV series have tried hands at the material that is usually found on The Twilight Zone. I am a fan of the Rod Serling's original series from the 50s and the 60s, not so much its new avatars. There are several The Twilight Zone episodes which could have served as inspiration to JL 50 like The Odyssey of Flight 33, The Arrival and The Last Flight.

Time travel, worm holes, parallel universes are not something Indian movies have handled well. One of the reasons could be the money required for creating believable VFX. Another could be, even when Indian movies tackle science fiction it ends up being a masala musical, like the time travel Tamil movie starring Suriya Sivakumar - 24. JL 50 used the excuse of being a TV series for not including any songs which would have been mandatory had it been a movie. At slightly longer that two hours total, this TV series is only as long as a typical Indian movie.

The best things about JL 50 are, the cast and the location. Calcutta/Kolkata, the first capital city of British India is a location tailor-made for time travel stories. With its yellow Ambassador taxi cabs, rickety trams and narrow inner city streets, it is a city still caught in its past. Paused at the edge of disintegration back to an older age, it is easy to recreate Calcutta from thirty-forty years ago in the current Kolkata. The makers of JL 50 make use of this chameleonic aspect of Calcutta to their advantage.

The cast led by Abhay Deol as CBI officer Shantanu and Pankaj Kapur as physics professor Das are outstanding. Ritika Anand, one of the producers of the series has a pivotal role as Capt. Bihu Ghosh, the pilot of the ill-fated JL 50. I see it as a nod to the female commercial pilots in India, especially Durba Banerjee (first woman commercial pilot to fly Indian Airlines in 1956) who is also from the state of West Bengal. (Calcutta is the capital of West Bengal.) India had female commercial pilots (Prem Mathur in 1947 was the first commercial woman pilot in India) and Women Pilots Association long before United States had its first female commercial pilot - Bonnie Tiburzi in 1973 for American Airlines.

Returning back from the aviation history tangent to JL 50, the story and direction of the TV series is by Shailender Vyas. While there are some plot holes and goofs in the story line, as a viewer who had always wanted to see a desi take (or more) on The Twilight Zone, I appreciate Mr.Vyas taking up the challenge of making an Indian sci-fi series. With an open-ended ending, I hope he will be back with more and please make sure to include Abhay Deol - he is more than half the reason I enjoyed this series as much as I did.