'Pritam and Pedro' Review: Rajkumar Hirani's Debut Series is a Dated Exercise

'Pritam and Pedro' has no granularity. It is cybercrime explained at the level of a school assembly.

Arshad Warsi in a still from Pritam and Pedro.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

Rajkumar Hirani has spent two decades turning simple ideas into big, feel-good hits.

On Pritam and Pedro, his first streaming outing as creator, co-writer, and producer, that instinct doesn't show up. What is left is the trick without the charm.

The six-episode JioHotstar series is directed by Avinash Arun Dharware, the filmmaker behind Killa, Paatal Lok, and Three of Us. It's an odd pairing on paper. Hirani makes cheerful, sanded-down cinema. Arun makes moody, textured, specific work. None of that specificity survives here. The show looks and moves like a generic OTT product.

You would never guess it was directed by someone with an eye.

A Buddy-Cop Plot That Solves Itself

Pedro (Arshad Warsi) is a Crime Branch cop in Goa, punished for a colleague's mistake and shunted off to the Cyber Crime Cell. To him, typing a password already counts as hard labour. Pritam (Vir Hirani) is a young ‘cyber genius’ who actually sells vacuum cleaners for a living. When a politician's son goes missing, the two team up: Pedro needs the case solved to earn his old job back, while Pritam wants help recovering his grandfather's stolen tape recorder, which holds an old recording of his late grandmother's voice.

Even when you defend the oversimplified premise, it’s hard to defend its execution. An ATM heist is cracked in minutes. A missing child turns up without much digging. Cases untangle because the plot needs them to, not because anyone on screen does real detective work.

Mona Singh in a still from Pritam and Pedro.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

Cybercrime as Set Dressing

For a show built entirely around cybercrime, Pritam and Pedro, co-written by Hirani, Abhijat Joshi, and Suyash Trivedi, has almost no curiosity about it.

Hacking, blackmail, doxxing, morphed photos, leaked videos—all of it functions as plot furniture. How any of it actually works is never the point. Technology is simply the villain, blamed for everything that goes wrong for everyone on screen, the way Hirani once let the media take the fall in Sanju.

If anything, the source material deserved better.

The show is loosely based on Amit Dubey's books Hidden Files: Tales of Cyber Crime Investigation and Return of the Trojan Horse, drawn from a real cyber-investigator's actual casework. That in itself is a rich territory.

India has a booming true-crime appetite for exactly this subject, and shows like Jamtara have already proven audiences will follow smart, granular cybercrime storytelling.

Vir Hirani in a still from Pritam and Pedro.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

Pritam and Pedro has none of that granularity. It is cybercrime explained at the level of a school assembly.

The Hirani Problem

Over the course of his career, Hirani has built a career on one move: take a complicated issue, strip out everything difficult about it, and sell the simplified version back to audiences as wisdom.

The times that it worked—3 Idiots, PK—have often been because the flattening came wrapped in comic timing and warmth. I can’t say either shows up in Pritam and Pedro.

Instead we have a hero who is impressed by things a teenager would find obvious, a plot that keeps circling back to infidelity as the root of every crime, a script that explains everything twice, and an out-of-touch creator consumed by his own templates.

That's the harder truth about this show: Hirani isn't just simplifying a hard subject for clarity anymore. He's condescending to his audience and calling it a signature style, and he's been doing it long enough that he no longer seems to notice it as a flaw.

It used to read as populist and big-hearted. Now it reads like a filmmaker who hasn't updated his idea of what audiences already know. The stray attempts at political commentary—a line about criticism being healthy for democracy, a joke about cash and demonetisation—feel like leftover habits from that old playbook, dropped in without any conviction.

Nobody in the show’s cast is bad. They are just underused. Arshad Warsi does the most with the least, finding some comic rhythm in a character written as a one-note grump, although even he can't manufacture chemistry with a scene partner this stiff. Vir Hirani, in his acting debut, is pleasant enough, but the role gives him nothing to play: no conflict, no edge, no arc. It shows how flat he remains across six episodes.

The supporting cast of Mona Singh, Boman Irani, and Vikrant Massey are all capable actors handed scraps; Massey in particular is reduced to one long sneer. The cameos from Sanjay Dutt and Virender Sehwag feel like favours called in, not real contributions.

Vikrant Massey in a still from Pritam and Pedro.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

That seems to be the show’s throughline: An obvious launchpad vehicle for Hirani’s son, padded out with decent talent who are all wasted on a script that never asks much of anyone or even itself.

A Decade Out of Date

Across six oddly plotted episodes, Pritam and Pedro ends up proving something else entirely: that Hindi filmmakers still can't imagine a hacker as anything more than a guy typing fast.

In the show, Pritam solves every problem the same way: laptop open, fingers going fast, case cracked. It is the same shorthand the industry has leaned on since Neeraj Pandey's A Wednesday! (2008), except every iteration has been getting only more stale. The specific online scare the show keeps returning to—a bullying trend that made headlines well over a decade ago—belongs to an earlier, slower internet, not the one people actually live in today. Real harm online today looks different: harder to trace, and much harder to solve in the time it takes someone to type.

A series built entirely around cybercrime, working from real investigative casework as its source, had the chance to update that picture for a 2026 audience. Instead, it settled for the version everyone has already seen.

Pritam and Pedro releases on Jio Hotstar on 3 July.

(Poulomi Das is a film critic, journalist, and programmer based in Goa. Her writing on film has appeared in national and international publications including MUBI Notebook, Vulture, Polis Project, Hyperallergic, Mint Lounge, India Today Magazine and The Hollywood Reporter India among others. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)