Amazon Prime Video’s latest series, Big Girls Don’t Cry, is created by Nitya Mehra. The series stars Avantika Vandanapu, Aneet Padda, Dalai, Vidushi, Tenzin Lhakyila, Afrah Sayed, Akshita Sood, and Pooja Bhatt. Like any high-school drama, the show is replete with new friendships, youthful rebellion, jealousies and even love. Here’s our review of Big Girls Don’t Cry.

A tale of sisterhood

Big Girls Don’t Cry revolves around six teenage girls – Roohi (Aneet Padda), JC (Tenzin Lhakyila), Ludo (Avantika Vandanapu), Pluggy (Dalai), Kavya (Vidushi) and Noor (Afrah Sayed) and follows them through their time at Vandana Valley Girls School.

BGDC series kicks off with a new student, Kavya, joining Vandana Valley Girls School in Ooty. As she walks through the school, the matron talks of all the things that are not allowed – chocolates, chewing gum, mobile phones, technology and boys (only brothers are allowed). She is a scholarship student struggling to fit in with her peers. 

We then meet two best friends, Jayasree aka JC, a Nepali princess whose life is pre-decided by her grandmother, and Roohi, a young rebel from a dysfunctional home. Then we are introduced to Noor, the junior school captain and the topper who wants to drop her last name Hassan, Pluggy, a curly-haired young girl who writes erotic novels and is desperate to lose her virginity and Ludo, the basketball team captain struggling with her identity. We also have the rebellious Dia (Akshita Sood), a poetry-spouting activist.

Big Girls Don’t Cry is all about sisterhood. The girls stick together through everything until they don’t. The best part, though, is even when they are at odds, no one actively tries to harm the other. But the sisterhood spiel fails when all the young girls on the sideline are rooting for drama and cheering on when friends are fighting. They are waiting for the downfall of their classmates and enjoying the show. And this doesn’t bode well for the sisterhood and girls empowering girls message the show aims for. 

It’s a long drama with nothing much to say

Big Girls Don’t Cry is a 7-episode series with a runtime of about 45-60 minutes each, and it is way longer than necessary. BGDC could easily have been a two-and-a-half-hour film or at least a series with shorter episodes. It starts well, and the first episode reels you in. But by the time you reach episode three, you are waiting for something to happen and things to move along. Everything is painfully drawn out, and you are waiting for the end.

BGDC tries to tackle a bucketload of issues from sexuality to feminism, ambition to Islamophobia. Too many cooks spoil the broth, and that’s exactly the problem with Big Girls Don’t Cry. It tries to check all the boxes but fails to make a solid point worth remembering.

The series doesn’t have a single protagonist. All seven women are vying to take centre stage, which doesn’t work in the show’s favour. With so many stories running parallel, it fails to make any impact as none of the stories get their due.

Big Girls Don’t Cry could have been so much more than the shell that it currently is. The series has good actors who put forward brilliant performances, but they are all wasted in this half-cooked show.

Can you watch Big Girls Don’t Cry with your family?: The series is rated A, so keep the kids away from this.

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