The last 12 months have been a rollercoaster ride for made-in-India shows on streaming platforms. Kohrra, Trial by Fire and Farzi had viewers hooked with strong scripts, well-searched plots and breakthrough performances. OTT has become just too big for Bollywood to ignore, and this year, stars like Alia Bhatt, Sonakshi Sinha and Shahid Kapoor all made their streaming debuts. As the Gen Z phrase goes, ‘they ate’, doing it all in style.
Kohrra
Netflix’s Kohrra turns its back on the stereotypes about Punjab, and instead focussed on the complexity of human relationships. At the same time, it offers an incisive sociological commentary of the state and its troubled history with corruption, drugs, hypermasculinity and police brutality. A police procedural—but not your standard run-of-the-mill fare—the show made inroads into the psyche of its characters, from Balbir (Suvinder Vicky) and Garundi (Barun Sobti) to Nimrat (Harleen Sethi). Everyone is battling demons that dance in and out of focus as the murder mystery unfolds.
The Railway Men: The Untold Story of Bhopal 1984
The Railway Men recreates one of the world’s worst industrial tragedies — from the responders’ lens. Over 15,000 people died in the immediate aftermath when methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas escaped from the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh on the night of 2 and 3 December 1984.
Directed by Shiv Rawail and written by Asayush Gupta, the show’s USP is its refusal to glorify the heroes, even as it focuses on them. The intersection of the Sikh riots spreading from Delhi, adds to the tension.
Madhavan, Kay Kay Menon, Divyenndu and Babil Khan lead the show as real and fictional charactersrelated to the tragedy. The four episodes focus on the men who lead the battle to save as many people as possible and bring to fore a sense of hope not usually associated with the gas leak. It is the performances of the four leads that truly makes the show one of its kind. Kay Kay’s role as thestation master of Bhopal junction tugs at your heart that is followed by a surprisingly mature, earnest performance by Babil, who plays an idealistic blue-collar worker, who does not hesitate to lay his life to save many.
Trial by fire
Tragedies can be written without titillation or excesses. With a knockout performances by Rajhri Deshpande, as Neelam Krishnamoorthy, and Abhay Deol as Shekhar Krishnamoorthy, the show stays true to facts, and gives an overview of the 1997 Uphaar tragedy that took place in Delhi.
From rage, helplessness to a legal fight spanning 24 years, with death threats, legal documents that mysteriously went missing to looking at both the heroes and villains of the story, Trial By Fire undertook a mammoth task, and won at it.
The horror in the show is not the tragedy itself, but what it takes for justice to prevail, and often too little, too late.
Jubilee
Vikramaditya Motwane’s homage to the 1940s Hindi cinema and filmmaking is a poem on celluloid. Loosely based on the lives and times of Himanshu Rai, who established Bombay Talkies, and his wife Devika Rani, as well as actors Ashok Kumar and Raj Kapoor. Sidhant Gupta as actor filmmaker Jay Khanna and Wamiqa Gabbi as the courtesan-turned-actor Niloufer steal the show with their performances and chemistry.
The sheer detailing of the show, in terms of art direction and costumes in particular stand out. A slow burn, Jubilee transports its audience to a world where Bollywood was just a concept, and few people gave their everything, to set it up.
Farzi
The maverick duo Raj and DK, who had already set the OTT-verse on fire with The Family Man (2020), came back with a slick thriller Farzi, starring Shahid Kapoor, Vijay Sethupathi and Rashi Khanna. Set in Mumbai, the cat-and-mouse game between Sethupati’s Michael and Shahid’s Sunny aka Artist is a dark comedy that leaves you in equal parts splits and tears.
Packed with surprise packages like Bhuvan Arora, and very Mumbai lingo, the show is a Raj and DK take on counterfeit currency scam, the likes of which India has seen plenty, both in real and on celluloid. Farzi makes the ride enjoyable from the get go, and never lets the audience and its characters off the hook in this near – breathless eight-episode ride.
Dahaad
Using caste as its locus, Reema Kagti’s Dahaad, literally roar, is a powerful sucker punch. Set in rural Rajasthan, the case of lower caste women found dead mysteriously in public washrooms opens up the can of worms that India refuses to acknowledge–caste and gender-based crimes.
Sonakshi Sinha makes a towering OTT debut as the Dalit cop Anjali Bhati, hell bent on solving the case of missing women, while Vijay Varma as the serial killer Anand is a chillingly soft-spoken masterful performance. It takes the two, and Kagti’s writing to create an unforgettable show.
Kaala Paani
Fused with many small humane moments in the middle of an urgent, desperate race for survival, Kaala Pani is a good mix of post-apocalyptic thriller and cautionary tale. The show has multiple threads that are woven expertly together by its writer Biswapati Sarkar. The biomedical tale looks at greedy corporations, a flailing local administration, beliefs of an indigenous tribe and limitations of human knowledge, all the while lives are snuffed out relentlessly by an unknown disease almost bring the horror of the first instances of the Covid pandemic to mind.
Scoop
Based on former journalist Jigna Vohra’s book Behind the Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison, Scoop focuses on the life of deputy news bureau chief and crime reporter Jagruti Pathak (Karishma Tanna). Mumbai underworld, police and journalism create a heady cocktail of content in the show. A nod to journalists, Scoop hinges on non-sensalisation, despite the lucrative and fairly successful trope of Bombay mafia.
The show also marks the comeback of Harman Baweja, who aced his role as a scrupulous, pot-bellied government lackey.
School of lies
A solidly crafted whodunit, School of Lies uses the case of a missing child to highlight issues ranging from mental health to the cyclical nature of abuse. Avinash Arun Dhaware’s direction steers the script to a place where it doesn’t really give a closure, leaving larger social questions unanswered. It isn’t all tied together.
It stands out for its critique of how lying is institutionalised, especially in structures like the education system.
Tooth Pari
A one of its kind horror comedy, with romance and vampires, set in Kolkata might sound jarring. But Pratim D Gupta’s screenplay and direction makes Tooth Pari an enjoyable watch. A young rebellious vampire Rumi (Taniya Maniktala) loses her canine and needs an introverted dentist Dr Bikram Roy (Shantanu Maheshwari) to fix it. Their love story is punctured by a group of vampire hunters lead by Meera (Revathi) and a police inspector equally obsessed with knowing the ‘truth’ about the underground world inhabited by vampires and Rumi. It definitely makes for a better version of a vampire tale than the Twilight series.