Maharani Season 4 moves from the charged politics of Bihar in the 1990s to Delhi, slowing to a glacial crawl. What began as a sharp tale of ambition and agency now drifts into weary repetition, losing its bite and soul
Maharani Season 4, which premiered on SonyLIV on November 7, begins with Prime Minister Sudhakar Sriniwas Joshi (Vipin Sharma) reading a line about Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and the “patthar dil” (heart of stone) one needs to rule. It’s a striking idea that political power requires a kind of pre-emptive self-erasure and hollowing out.
You can almost sense the show reaching for the grandeur of a classical tragedy, where ambition is both destiny and death sentence. But then as it progresses, painfully slowly, you realise that this season isn’t tragedy, it’s ambient television.
For a political thriller, Maharani Season 4 is surprisingly sluggish. Characters talk like the audience has all the time in the world. Scenes move at a glacial pace. Entire episodes feel like the show has transcended second-screen friendly and achieved “background noise while folding laundry” nirvana. It is frustrating.
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When Maharani launched its first season (which also had its pacing issues), it promised teeth. It was rooted in the messy, caste-driven politics of the 1990s Bihar, where an illiterate homemaker became Chief Minister overnight. The show traced the outlines of Rabri Devi and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s political ascent, remixing it into a fictional universe that was familiar enough to bite but distant enough to play with. That promise has gone faint this season.
Rani Bharti sets eyes on Delhi
Across its three previous seasons, Maharani traces the dramatic political awakening and transformation of Rani Bharti (Huma Qureshi), an uneducated homemaker thrust into power when her husband, Bheema Bharti (Sohum Shah), the CM of Bihar, is shot in an assassination attempt and names her his successor.
What begins as reluctant stewardship turns into a fierce assertion of agency as Rani confronts endemic corruption and patriarchal power in a state mired in “jungle raj.” With Bheema later jailed and running a proxy government, Rani battles betrayal, rival politicians like Navin Kumar, and mounting conspiracies that eventually see her framed and imprisoned.
In Season 3, after three years behind bars and completing her education, she returns more resolute than ever, reclaiming her political footing, avenging her husband’s death, and dismantling Navin Kumar’s corrupt regime through shrewd, justice-driven manoeuvres that expose the rot in Bihar’s political machinery.
This time, Rani Bharti (Qureshi, still dependable), sets her eyes on Delhi. Having stepped down as CM, she decides the only adequate response to humiliation by the PM is, naturally, revenge via the Lok Sabha. She’s tired of being underestimated by men, undermined by allies, and outmanoeuvred by her own party. Delhi is now the ultimate ego bruise balm for her. In the process, she also grows increasingly paranoid, shutting her long-loyal aid Kaveri (Kani Kusruti) out in the process.
The party itself is split after this decision. The seniors back Satyendranath Mishra (Pramod Pathak) as the new successor. The younger workers rally behind Jai (Shardul Bharadwaj), Rani’s eldest son, who is trying very hard to be taken seriously in a household where both his older sister Roshni (Shweta Basu Prasad) and younger brother Surya (Darsheel Safary, permanently seated on a London bench typing like an NPC/non-player character in a student simulator) outdo him in different ways. Jai’s heart, for all its misfires and misbehaviours, is in the right place.
Dynastic politics and nepotism
But there are no major ethical spirals or scintillating intellectual sparring. Just a sense of tired inevitability: someone betrays someone, someone quotes mythology, someone plots in an office with dim lighting. It’s a political drama by template: twist for the sake of twist, betrayal for the sake of betrayal.
The main problem here is that the writing simply isn’t hefty enough, and the delivery from the character is not invigorating enough either. The series gestures toward grand political theatre but performs it like an early morning college lecture. It is tepid and you might fall asleep; and even after you wake up you would have missed nothing. The premise swears by only one truism: in politics there are no friends, only shifting alliances. We have learned this already, both in the show and in Indian news cycles.
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While the season opens with the recognition that power is profoundly lonely and anyone at the top can go hungry for more in order to protect the stakes, the series doesn’t convert that theme into urgency.
Even when it raises queries about dynastic politics and nepotism (when Rani unilaterally elects her daughter Roshni as the next Bihar CM), the show refuses to investigate or engage with its core problems. Qureshi’s Rani gets to deliver a quick quip about how merit and experience can never be tested without opportunity. It is not the smart rhetoric the show thinks it to be.
Build-up for a storm?
Prasad’s Roshni also gets a filmy line lifted right off Atlee's Jawan (2023), “Maa se baat karne se pehle beti se baat karo (Talk to the daughter before you talk to the mother),” which is not as punchy or meaningful as it was when Shah Rukh Khan delivered it after the fiasco with his son Aryan’s arrest.
Maharani Season 4 gets to be occasionally thoughtful but it is not sharp. It is not hungry. And worse, it is not really memorable. The lack of complexity needed to keep a political thriller alive in a post-House of Cards world is jarring. Credit where it’s due: the actors are all seasoned enough to keep the machinery from collapsing. Qureshi holds the centre. Sharma brings a weary dignity to a PM whose coalition is disintegrating in real time.
The direction this season is by Puneet Prakash and while it is steady it is not engaging enough. Perhaps his stretched-out storytelling hints at the fact that the show isn’t wrapping up anytime soon. In an era when major OTT platforms cancel shows mid-sentence, the assurance that Maharani will get more seasons might feel comforting to its audience. If all this is the set-up for a storm, then fine. Let them build. All we can hope for is that the show has not run out of anything new to say.
