An eloping couple is brutally attacked by masked goons in Haryana. He is killed, and she ends up in a coma. The incident brings the girl’s two brothers back to their hometown. They are forced to reunite with their estranged father — the abusive parent who once drove them away — in pursuit of revenge. ‘Justice’ is not an option. The younger son is softer and more forgiving of the dad; the elder one is wary and resentful. But the three men launch their own unofficial investigation; the suspects range from the father’s jealous rivals and local mafia bosses to corrupt politicians and Khap panchayat leaders. It quickly spirals into a violent whodunnit in a lawless land.
Glory may not sound original, but that’s because this is a no-context premise. Given that caste angles are tricky to stage these days, it reframes “honour” as a toxic sibling of glory. The title actually alludes to the language of a sports drama. Here’s how the premise reads with context. The girl, Gudiya, is the daughter of a legendary coach, Raghubir Singh (Suvinder Vicky), in India’s prime boxing town Shaktigarh. The boyfriend, Nihaal, was Singh’s star pupil and the golden hope for the upcoming Olympics. The brothers who arrive are Devender (Divyenndu) and Ravinder (Pulkit Samrat), Singh’s former proteges who ‘failed’ him five years ago and abandoned his medal dreams. Once they’re back, their desire to avenge their sister results in a plan that somehow involves Ravinder’s return to professional boxing. His career becomes an instrument to dig in, uncover clues and get to the bottom of the crime.
What’s interesting, in theory at least, is how the seven-episode series uses one genre as a vehicle to deconstruct another. The training montages are the same, but the purpose is different; ambition becomes a more human and selfish trait. For the most part, Mirzapur-coded bloodlust is what drives the characters. Sports simply starts out as the medium: a pulpy version of how patriotism and war became a medium for an underdog to achieve his dreams in Chandu Champion (2024). Ravinder enrolls himself into an academy that contains a crucial lead, while the rugged Devender does the sleuthing and chasing on the outside; the father is naturally the one who supports them and atones for his past sins.
The first episode introduces this concept effectively. The setup is also a neat take on how we perceive athletes and their against-all-odds backstories. Most boxers and non-cricketing stars tend to come from great hardships and darkness; they’re often reduced to the spectacle of their stories. The popular notion is that something beyond the human will and physicality to succeed — a personal tragedy perhaps, or the dire need to defeat poverty and protect their family — spurs them on. With its twisty plot, Glory literalises the proverbial ‘sacrifices’ and abusive parenting it takes to break through. These are not top athletes, so their greatness is not a consequence of skill; their spirit stems from darker and more complicated aches. Sports may not be the endgame, but it’s a means to a similar end; the obsession that haunts this family of men is what defines the storyline. Ravi is doing it for his sister, but the counterpoint is more loaded: it could be the tragedy that activates his dormant love for boxing. It may be the missing X-factor for a boxer otherwise destined for anonymity.
The problem with Glory is that it eventually loses itself in its own gimmick. For starters, the conceit — the identity of the person responsible for the incident — is painfully obvious from the first episode. It can be seen coming from so far away that it may as well be the moon on a Karwa Chauth night in a ‘90s Bollywood romance. The screenplay fights a losing battle after that. Much of the film-making — the gory deaths, the grimy action set pieces, the campy threads — is designed to offset the lack of suspense. It tries everything to distract and lead the viewer towards other colourful tangents and red herrings. All this does is inflate the world with narrative gas. The answer is always hiding these in plain sight for anyone who pays attention to the duality of the title and the central theme. Perhaps it would have served the series better if it weren’t a twist all along (a worthy subversion of an Indian sports template), or if Glory were a feature-length script that didn’t have to edge for so long. In fact, even the nature of the twist feels wrong; the writing misses a beat in terms of how far it takes the killer’s intent. It doesn’t fully commit to the psychological leap of faith.
There is something to be said about the conventional crime drama being a smokescreen, but even the story gets carried away by its own front. It ends up bifurcating the genres through the brothers, and then doing justice to none. You can tell that it ultimately becomes about packing in multiple tones for the price of one; Dev and Ravi become protagonists of disconnected journeys that struggle to sync with each other. As a viewer, you either run with the idea or get derailed by the execution. The Abbas-Mustan-style revelations in one dimension do not co-exist with a boxing drama in which a sappy monologue about Muhammad Ali is supposed to signal a change in priorities. To hear a character trapped in a casteless and apolitical environment get inspired by the humanity and spine of Ali is ironic to say the least. “I want to rise above hate” is a weak line to justify it. The countdown to the Olympic trials feels like a separate show altogether, and the sport of it all gets deflated in the process of raising the stakes of the whodunnit. The finale is a damp squib; the parallel tracks don’t land because the mystery was never in doubt.
It doesn’t help that the supporting characters are staged as high-pitched parodies of themselves: a seductive housewife from Jharkhand, an eccentric mafia don who does digital coin flips to decide the fate of his victims, a good-boy cop who helps the brothers, a scrappy female journalist who doubles up as a love interest, a comical Khap leader who grieves the ‘explosive’ death of a buffalo, a rival boxing academy boss with the swag of the Rajput college coach from Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar. Each of them plays a role so hard that it’s impossible to see them as anything but human diversions who exist to deflect the reveal. Of the lead cast, only Divyenndu shows sparks of his Mirzapur form; his depiction of a one-legged Dev borders on the unpredictable, and the series does well to invert the unhinged-son prototype. Pulkit Samrat is sincere enough as the naive brother who still addresses his old man as “Coach Sir,” but the sincerity flattens the grit of Ravi, a pugilist who perhaps senses the truth but is determined to find his way back to the sport. Suvinder Vicky is a better actor than his role as the repentant dad from hell allows him to be. He’s been typecast as this morally ambivalent patriarch to a point where he’s now the singular answer to the question: what kind of roles would Amrish Puri have gotten in the streaming era?
I also believe that Glory might have been a more compelling series if it weren’t so limited by the passive-viewing algorithm. The ‘rules’ and checklists are too palpable. For instance, Dev’s intro is a trauma-dream of his past: the voices and images virtually spell out the backstory of his family under the pretext of old news clips and flashes. The script keeps bending over backwards to display information under the guise of conversations and face-offs; people narrate their lives to each other more than they speak. Exposition dumps and subtext are clunkily woven into every other scene, lest the viewer zones out and needs another chance to catch up. A villain’s personality is designed in a manner where he quizzes his victims while toying with them; even the boxing commentators — whose job it is to provide context — have nothing on the characters themselves. A show like this struggles to pass these off as creative choices. The compromises become part of the artifice, not the commercial texture. There is no prospect for emotions to remain emotions, or even shots to remain shots. Everything is in service of telling, which is why the showing (the violence and expletives) often overcompensates to convey a sense of cinema. It becomes all about provoking a series of timed shocks — a smashed head, a severed hand, a cliffhanger, a transition, a turn in mood — instead of affecting a reaction. In other words, the glory of creation is consumed by the art of calibration. It’s self-defeating to subvert formulas when the landscape is rigged against risks. It’s a tired question worth posing again and again: Is it better to have created and lost than to have never created at all?