Pritam and Pedro review: Hotstar series glorified micro-drama with cliched plot, half-baked characters
Produced and co-created by Rajkumar Hirani and starring Arshad Warsi as Goa cop Pedro, the crime-comedy series acts as a launchpad for Hirani's son Vir, who plays the mysterious Pritam. But the series works neither as a procedural drama nor as a comedy.
Arshad Warsi and Vir Hirani in the Hotstar series Pritam and Pedro.
A computer whiz and a tech-challenged cop team up to solve a missing person case in Hotstar’s new crime-comedy series Pritam and Pedro, co-created by the illustrious Rajkumar Hirani. The series essentially serves as a launch vehicle for his son, Vir, who plays the mysterious Pritam. We meet the young man as he’s trying to report his grandfather’s missing tape recorder at a Goa police station run by Pedro, played by Arshad Warsi. The cops throw him in jail when he refuses to leave without registering his complaint. Instantly, Pritam stands out as an honourable young man, while Pedro comes across as a no-nonsense veteran who has seen it all. On paper, they make for the perfect odd-couple — the Indian film industries don’t make nearly enough buddy comedies. However, that’s about as interesting as things get, because, at the end of the day, this is a Hirani production.
Pritam and Pedro works neither as a procedural drama nor as a comedy. After being made a scapegoat in a pointless case, Pedro is assigned to the local cybercrime unit. The show’s idea of fish-out-of-water humour is to devote three full minutes to Pedro, who values boots-on-the-ground tactics like Hirani reveres a manipulative script, trying and failing to access his office computer. Does only the cybercrime unit have computers with passwords? We'll never know. Five minutes later, when a man comes complaining that his company’s servers have been wiped, Pedro asks if he has checked the CCTV footage. It’s all very juvenile. In order to survive his punishment posting and crack the case of a missing child, Pedro has no choice but to recruit Pritam. In exchange, he promises to recover Pritam’s lost tape recorder.
Poor writing, performances
Hirani and his co-writers, Abhijat Joshi and Suyash Trivedi, make an honest attempt to flesh out the characters of both Pritam and Pedro. But the backstories they've come up with belong in an entirely different show. Pedro’s core trauma isn’t completely inconceivable, but the origin story that the show gives to Pritam is nonsensical on multiple levels. Once you’ve recovered from the narrative whiplash of the revelation, you’ll retroactively be struck by how poorly-pitched the writing and the performances have been so far.
A shocking reveal happens towards the end of the season, but Pritam behaves as if he is learning about his own past along with the audience. He seems positively chipper in the first few episodes, which isn’t how you’d expect someone with his demons to behave. Some of the fault lies with how the character has been written; the rest is down to the direction and the performances. Knowing that director Avinash Arun Dhaware is capable of extracting the best out of his actors — he made the drama film Three of Us and worked on the first season of Prime Video’s Paatal Lok — one is left with no choice but to question the young Hirani’s work.
Pritam is a young man from Goa, but he has such a thick Bandra (Mumbai neighbourhood) accent that he may as well be ordering a Spanish latte to go at Veronica’s (the sandwich shop and cafe in Bandra). The show does him no favours with its limited imagination. It’s telling that nearly two decades have passed since Neeraj Pandey’s thrilling feature A Wednesday, but Bollywood’s idea of “hackers” has barely evolved. At several junctures, Pritam magically solves every problem facing the investigation by simply flipping open his laptop and typing intensely. No barrier is too high for Pritam to cross; no server too encrypted for him to pierce. After a point, you lose interest in scenes meant to draw you in, purely because you already know how they’ll end.
Pinning hope on cameos
As if aware of its own repetitive narrative, Pritam and Pedro throws Vikrant Massey into the mix halfway through the protagonists' investigation. He’s a hacker as well. We now have a face-off between two characters whose superpower is using the computer. How cinematic! The content is often dated. For instance, Hirani and his writers seem to be obsessed with the Blue Whale Challenge, a cyberbullying epidemic that made headlines literally more than a decade ago. The world has moved on; children are still as vulnerable as ever online, but the dangers they face are hardly the same.
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As it turns out, the show’s archaic approach isn’t limited to its storytelling. A climactic flourish, presented as a comedic bit, is so ineffective that it ruins the few salvageable qualities of the story preceding it. This is when Pritam and Pedro hurls cameos by Virendra Sehwag and Sanjay Dutt at the audience, mostly as a distraction tactic. It’s also the second time in his career (after Sanju) that Hirani has made his disdain for the press clear. The filmmaker has never displayed a strong command over tone — his movies could go from broad comedy to sappy melodrama in the span of minutes — but Pritam and Pedro doesn’t even have the safety net of a big budget to smoothen out some of its edges. At six 30-minute episodes long, it's basically a glorified micro-drama, complete with the thinly written characters, the cliche-ridden plot developments, and twists you can see coming from a mile away.
