THE WEEK THAT WAS

Ishqiya | ARY, Mondays 8.00pm

The plot thickens when a shocked Humna (Ramsha Khan) receives college sweetheart Hamza (Feroze Khan) and his family at her doorstep. The shock becomes a blow when Humna finds out that they have arrived with Hamza’s marriage proposal not for her but her sister Rumaisa (Hania Aamir). So while he was going through a silent phase while recovering from his near-fatal car accident, Hamza was working on a revenge plan, because Humna had dumped him under family pressure and got engaged to Azeem (Gohar Rasheed).

Ehd-i-Wafa | Hum TV, Sundays 8.00pm

The somewhat disconnected addition of Humayun Saeed as Major Humayun might have enhanced the ratings but, apart from the suspense of whether either Saad (Ahad Raza Mir) or Gulzar (Adnan Samad Khan) would die in the last episode, there was nothing extraordinary about the last episode. The four friends Shahzain (Osman Khalid Butt), Shehryar (Ahmed Ali Akbar), Saad (Ahad Raza Mir) and Shariq (Wahaj Ali) come full circle as after love, anger, deceit, intrigue and up and downs, they find purposeful careers and love interests in their lives. Brimming with patriotism, the serial was entertaining and the dialogue, story, direction, performances and filming remained at par with Adnan Samad Khan emerging as the most promising new find. In the new trend of packaging together two episodes for screening at cinemas, the 90-minute bumper episode was so loaded with serial recaps, flashbacks and commercial breaks, that the story sadly lost its impact.

What To Watch Out For (Or Not)

Deewangi | Geo TV, Sundays 8.00pm

Instead of dragging along the saga of Sultan’s (Danish Taimoor) revenge on Nageen (Hiba Bukhari), the story moves on a tad unpredictably. Nageen’s sister Nuzhat (Faiza Gilani) discovers that her greedy husband (Noor-ul-Hasan) has taken a huge chunk of money from the undesirable Anwar (Ali Rizvi) to marry Nageen off to him. Nuzhat asks Nageen to run away and disappear to a relative’s house in Lahore. Just when Nageen is about to leave, Anwar forcibly enters the house and, in a squabble with him, Nageen accidentally kills him by smashing a lamp on his head. She runs away from the crime scene and, at the railway station, bumps into a stranger (Ali Abbas) who falls in love with her at first sight. Whatever situation Nageen may be in, the writer makes sure she has the same mesmerising effect on men — after all, didn’t Sultan fall for her in exactly the same way?

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 22nd, 2020