'Pharma' Series Review: Earnest Nivin Pauly In A Medico-Thriller That Requires Patience

There’s something about PR Arun’s Pharma that takes you back to the whistleblower dramas of the 90s. Although it’s set in the dubious world of pharma and the corrupt practices there in the late 2000s, it recalls films like The Firm and The Street Lawyer, both based on John Grisham novels, in the way it takes an insider’s efforts to redeem himself for a major corporation to be taught a lesson. The arc of Pharma too is familiar and predictable but through its lead actor Nivin Pauly, one can sense the earnestness with which the series was written, especially when it handles a subject that requires patience to understand. By placing this subject within the realm of an experimental drug meant to be consumed by pregnant women, the importance of its message outshines the way it tries to say it.

Medical crime thrillers are particularly rare in Malayalam cinema. Apart from the sub-plots in films like Iyer The Great, Ayalum Njanum Thammil and a large portion of Mohanlal’s Nirnayam (based on Harrison Ford-starrer The Fugitive), it’s always felt like a genre that deserved a series of its own to explore in depth. PR Arun’s Pharma does this well by placing the larger arc of the corrupt system within the transformation arc of a man named KP Vinod (Nivin Pauly). At first, he appears to be too straightforward for the job he lands. As he announces himself as the topper of his pharmacist’s course, his mentor Alex (Binu Pappu) looks at him dismissively, because the only thing that matters in this profession is a lack of a moral code. So, when Alex handholds KP through the inner workings of an already corrupt business model, it’s KP’s loss of innocence that propels the narrative forward.

In part, some of these scenes feel familiar because they were addressed in AK Lohithadas’ Dhanam (1991). But if the life of a medical representative was just the starting point in that film, with Pharma, the show goes a lot deeper into the lives of people like KP and the sales targets of their jobs, which spells doomsday for a small army of people. There’s a lot of research and detailing that appears to have gone into these scenes, especially when we see KP learning the ropes of his profession. At some point, we realise that the medical field itself can be replaced with any other and you’d see the same character arc playing out. After what appears to be a quick rise to the top, it takes karma to teach him the lessons that matter in life.

But as with most of Pharma, it’s almost never the writing that’s the issue. Even in what appears to be the best written episode, we find the director trying too hard to stage almost the entire episode as though it was shot in one unbroken long-take. This idea makes sense conceptually when you understand the amount of information it’s trying to squeeze in during what appears to be a very busy day, but the gimmick is repeated so often that it looks like the decision of a crew that isn’t confident about its source material.

One can say the same about the dialogues as well. Even though you expect a certain amount of jargon and legalese in a show that combines the medical field with the world of a courtroom drama, you do not expect the exposition to be this basic. One can call out exact lines before a character gets to them, and this is especially grating when the series itself is already predictable. One can also sense that certain dramatic moments couldn’t quite achieve the impact that they set out to. In what could have been a moving sequence written specifically for a crosscut, we see a court announcing a verdict to the sound of a cricket bat hitting the ball. It’s a clever idea that brings back a payoff from a scene the series sets up hours before, but when the moment finally lands, you wonder what went wrong.

Not that these problems make the show unwatchable. Through this already familiar path, Nivin strives hard to make his character complex and engaging enough to be worth investing in. As he takes the Machiavellian path that finally takes him nowhere, we see a man mature through hollowness and heartbreak, as though it's a part of the job. As clunky as the making might seem, Pharma works best as a fairly engaging second-screen experience. It doesn’t tell you much that you already didn’t know but it’s earnest enough to hold on to you, even when you feel the essence slip away into a coma.