Pritam and Pedro Review: Not every thriller needs layers upon layers or twists that make you rewind. Pritam and Pedro, streaming on JioHotstar, seems to know that about itself. It isn’t trying to reinvent the crime genre, it’s a fast paced, six episode mystery that mixes humour, emotion and a bit of social commentary, and mostly gets away with it on charm and pace alone. The writing is far from the smartest part of the show, but the performances and brisk storytelling carry it through.
The story follows Pedro (Arshad Warsi), a police officer banished to the cybercrime cell as punishment, even though his heart still belongs to the Crime Branch. He’s also grappling with the loss of his young son, a grief that has left his marriage to his wife (Mona Singh) strained. When a minister’s son, addicted to a dangerous online game, goes missing, Pedro spots his chance to prove himself and earn his way back to the department he actually wants.To better his odds, Pedro teams up with Pritam (Vir Hirani), a gifted young hacker chasing a personal mission: finding his late grandfather’s stolen tape recorder, which holds a recording of his grandmother’s voice. After Pritam helps Pedro crack an ATM heist worth lakhs, Pedro agrees to use his resources to help track down the recorder. What starts as a transactional favour grows into a proper partnership, as the two dig into the kidnapping and stumble onto buried secrets and a sprawling cybercrime network. At the centre of it all is Martin (Vikrant Massey), a hacker whose choices end up driving most of the plot. Along the way, the show touches on cyberbullying, hacking, gaming addiction and the broader dangers of the internet for children, themes that feel timely, even if the series only really skims their surface.
That’s where the writing shows its limits. The script keeps things simple and doesn’t strain to be clever, juggling a crime mystery, emotional backstory and a social message all at once, and not always successfully. A few twists land more conveniently than convincingly, occasionally tipping into unintentional comedy, and some of the emotional beats needed more room to breathe than they’re given. There are good ideas scattered through the show, but it rarely pauses long enough to dig into any of them properly.
