Shabana Azmi is the pivot around which Dabba Cartel, a female-driven Netflix crime drama series, swivels. She is in her element. That is half the battle won. Winning the remaining half takes a bit of doing. Happily, it isn’t entirely beyond the team behind and before the camera. Azmi pulls her weight without missing a beat. She is ably supported by a wonderful ensemble cast that includes Jyotika, Nimisha Sajayan, Sai Tamhankar, Lillete Dubey, Shalini Pandey and Anjali Anand. The writing, too, contributes more than its mite to the show by putting a vigorous fresh spin on the genre. Yet, there is no escaping the feeling that the seven-episode Excel Entertainment-produced series, created by Shibani Akhtar, Gaurav Kapur, Vishnu Menon and Akanksha Seda, could have been a little tighter at the seams and a bit lighter at the edges. It falls just a touch short of being an unqualified success.

Shabana Azmi is the fiery queenpin of a female outfit. They ply a disreputable trade. Her underlings feel the heat of her glare. She suffers no fools. I’m talking, of course, about a film called Mandi, directed by the late, great Shyam Benegal and released in 1983. Its coolness remains unsurpassed, 42 years on. Dabba Cartel, a new Netflix crime series with Azmi again at the helm, tries its best to be cool. Co-created by Shibani Akhtar, the show has a novel core: a home chef’s dabba (tiffin) delivery business spirals into a perilous drug operation. The pin-balling narrative is tugged along over seven episodes. The characters are stock, but, coming at you in numbers, they keep up a busy rhythm, like players on a revolving stage. It has the mark of an Excel production: ample efficiency, not a lot of excellence.

It’s a motley bunch of characters. Hari (Bhupendra Jadawat) wants a posting in Germany. Wife Raji (Shalini Pandey) and he pretty much talk of Germany more than anything else. Hari’s mother, the Gujarati saree-clad Ba (Shabana Azmi) is more the onlooker than a participant. Only the book she’s reading ‘Poisonous Shadow’ is at odds with who she seems to be. Ravi’s harried boss Shankar (Jisshu Sengupta) makes a stylish, upper crust couple with wife Varuna (Jyothika). Her ambitious garment venture ‘Sitara’ is fashionably losing money. She does seem the nose-in-the-air rich man’s wife living it up on husband’s funds. Shankar and Ravi are a part of the Viva Life building and company, a pharma company that’s been dodgy with a now-banned product called Modella.

Renowned American jeweller Harry Winston once sent a precious diamond in an ordinary brown package by registered mail as he felt the less attention it draws, the more secure its delivery. Watching the women of Dabba Cartel casually supply dope all across the city of Mumbai as part of their tiffin courier service has a similar aplomb to it. In a shrewd but simple touch, there’s a bindi to tell regular lunch boxes from the suspect ones and avoid the chance of mix-up. Using everyday domestic imagery to camouflage an illegal enterprise is their masterstroke move but more than the trick, its the compulsions and challenges driving each of these five women that gives Dabba Cartel its spunk to a certain degree.

Dabba Cartel is an intriguing mix of a desi drug syndicate gone bad and suburban drama, with an added dose of the murky world of pharma industries. But most of all, this crime drama is the story of individuals pushed to the limit even when their intentions are well-meaning. Created by Shibani Akhtar, Vishnu Menon, Gaurav Kapur, and Akanksha Seda, the Netflix series has an impressive cast that does justice to different riveting plotlines that converge at one thrilling juncture. Taking place in the nondescript VivaLife Society in Thane, the so-called drug business starts off small and clandestine until it snowballs into something that has deadly consequences for all involved. There’s another layer of a pharma company covering up their involvement in the distribution of a lethal painkiller. Woven into this are the stories of men and women aiming for a better life, from a couple hoping to migrate to Germany to a maid wanting her young daughter to have nicer things. However, greed and ambition catch up with them, leaving them at a crossroads.

Dabba Cartel review: A group of Thane-based women come together to fend off multiple elements that are stopping them from being themselves. Sweet housewife Raji (Shalini Pandey), her dour mother-in-law Sheila (Shabana Azmi), mouthy domestic worker Mala (Nimisha Sajayan), unhappy wife-cum-entrepreneur Varuna (Jyotika), smart real-estate agent Shahida (Anjali Anand), all very different from each other, find common cause through an unlikely enterprise: the modest business of daily dabbas with ‘ghar-ka-khana’ laced with a little kick, turns into a ride whose rising profit comes with thrills and danger.