Suchin Mehrotra reviews Matka King, Amazon Prime Video’s eight-episode crime drama from creators Nagraj Manjule and Abhay Koranne, set in 1960s–70s Bombay and clearly inspired by the life of the late Ratan Khatri. Vijay Varma plays Brij Bhatti, a down-on-his-luck cotton trader who, fed up of being belittled by his heartless boss Lalchi Bhai (Gulshan Grover), sets out to build a new kind of gambling operation — a lottery-style system where he picks three cards every night at 9pm, and the numbers spread across the country like wildfire. The show frames Brij not as a gangster but as a sincere entrepreneur and a champion of the little guy, and asks the central question: is Brij Bhatti a good man? As Suchin notes, Matka King takes time to find its feet — the early episodes struggle with a painfully familiar morally-murky biopic template and weaknesses in craft, from obviously green-screen driving sequences to poorly staged crowd scenes and an overused voiceover. It carries big Scam 1992 energy, but rarely captures the aura, atmosphere or tension of its underground gambling world. Vijay Varma is in fine form as a man quietly maintaining his mild-mannered mask, with a solid supporting turn from Sai Tamhankar as his wife Barkha, Bhupendra Jadawat as his brother Lakshman, a scene-stealing Siddharth Jadhav as Dagdu, Girish Kulkarni as a journalist with a personal axe to grind, and Kritika Kamra as Gulrukh — the south Bombay widow who becomes the Matka Queen. Nagraj Manjule’s signature fire around caste and class flickers only in stray moments. Ultimately, it’s the personal drama that shines brightest — and that is the THR bottomline.