‘Pritam and Pedro’ Series Review: Rajkumar Hirani Makes A Long-form and Out-of-form OTT Debut

A young man, Pritam (Vir Hirani), is jailed for threatening a lazy constable. It’s Goa, of course. Pritam watches as the inspector of the police station, Pedro (Arshad Warsi), hears of a high-profile ATM robbery. The middle-aged cops have no idea where to start. So Pritam offers to help in return for freedom; he is immediately allowed to use their computer, and in ten minutes, he tracks the culprits down. He does it with the grating innocence of a child educating his grandparents about electronics.

The stage is set for a young-versus-old story of unsolicited sermons and intergenerational discord. Pedro soon gets demoted to Cyber Crime Cell duty so that he can do boomer stuff like mistake a computer server for a human server and ask “where’s the envelope?” when an email is mentioned. When the sports minister’s son goes missing, a punished Pedro teams up with Pritam, whose online ways are passed off as genius even though he’s just doing normal social-media-generation things like stalking and…thinking. Pedro is dumbed down to an extent where even Google Maps feels like a revelation. 

You can tell that this six-episode series is Rajkumar Hirani’s streaming debut (as creator). You cannot tell that it’s directed by Paatal Lok and Three of Us director Avinash Arun Dhaware; his film-making is more of a passive medium. There’s a piece to be written about how the OTT ecosystem has both sustained and flattened voices through its director-for-hire template, but that’s a piece for another day. Pedro’s predicament is essentially Hirani and long-time collaborator Abhijat Joshi’s call for old-school grit and analog heart in a digital storytelling landscape. The first episode even has courage from a previous era: a line like “opponents’ criticisms are necessary for any democracy to work” or “you thieves and your disguises are the reason burqas get so maligned”.

Pedro behaves like a boomer and simpleton who asks Pritam “how did you know?” every time common sense is employed. Evidently, he’s not a very good cop. But his battle for relevance is reduced to woefully out-of-touch Hiranisms. For instance, when Pedro reaches a hotel to talk a suicidal husband out of killing his wife and her lover. The youngsters track the location, but it’s up to Pedro to appeal to the off-duty cop. He then delivers a speech that more or less faults unfaithful wives for not getting how demanding police jobs are; he bemoans the workaholism and the whining at home. Needless to mention, the angry man steps down because Pedro convinces him to be a hero for his son. You can almost hear the signature “All is well, all is well” chant.

The easy criticism here is that the feel-goodness of such tropes does not have a place in today’s cynical world. Pedro is a typical Hirani hero: a misfit in the vein of rakish Munna Bhai, alien PK, student Rancho or wayward Sanju. The correct criticism is that the script will school everyone else to validate his cute-and-misunderstood antiquity. This means that someone — or something — will be blamed. Given the nature of the story, it’s ‘technology’ that takes the fall: a broad-strokes villain that brings to mind how the media is conveniently condemned for the protagonist’s issues in the Sanjay Dutt biopic. The overarching theme in Pritam and Pedro is that technology is baaaaaaad (in this precise knuckle-rapping tone). It’s naughty. It’s responsible for all that goes wrong: the missing boy, Pritam’s backstory, Pedro’s backstory (which spectacularly wastes Mona Singh in the familiar role of a grieving mother), a deranged hacker who shares a past with Pritam, a crook who threatens to leak intimate photos of his ex, a professor’s sex-tape going viral. Somehow it’s all related.

At one point, a scandalous picture is discredited on live news by placing it in the company of comically morphed photos of celebrities (basically, don’t believe what you see or hear anymore). At another point, a man is forgiven for being a psychopath because he’s a victim of a tech-triggered tragedy. I almost expected Pedro to use Gen-Z lingo like “Delulu is the only Solulu,” but the show does not cooperate. In contrast, Pritam’s track is designed to remind him of the humanity of the old days. The reason he crosses paths with Pedro is because he files an FIR when his old grandfather’s tape-recorder is stolen; the cassette inside had songs sung by his late grandmother. The older the device, the golden-er the emotions.

The performances are nothing to write — or type — home about. Arshad Warsi’s Pedro is functional at best. I assumed the show forgot about Vikrant Massey until he appears at the halfway mark, accompanied by a sinister harmonica riff that talks down on us. The emptiness of his eyes has nothing on his Sector 36 or Haseen Dillruba turns. Current streaming MVP Mona Singh has all of 1.5 scenes across 6 episodes, as a troubled wife who can come around with as little as a video of an estranged partner singing. Pritam is the acting debut of Vir Hirani, son of Rajkumar Hirani, but he has a long way to go with his Imran Khan-coded dialogue delivery and urban gestures that seem to be searching for the camera. The supporting cast and cameos are largely ineffective. It's the kind of minor-key comedy-meets-commentary project that might have been a film that scolded and judged us a decade ago: a pop-cultural relic that defends the identity of relics.

A lot of the humour plays out like it expects audience reactions in the theatre, or even applause cues within the scenes. The silence sounds awkward. None of it also lands because the core messaging is basic and misguided. Veteran filmmakers across the world often contend with the moral influence of technology in their movies; if nothing, the curiosity and anxieties show. But this is the cinematic equivalent of watching a colourful anti-smoking disclaimer. Except it's computers that are labeled as injurious to health. What's the point of discussing artificial intelligence when natural evolution is still feared?