Pritam and Pedro Review: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5)
Rajkumar Hirani’s OTT debut brings humor, heart, and social awareness, but an uneven screenplay stops it from becoming truly memorable. Arshad Warsi and newcomer Vir Hirani make an entertaining pair, but the cybercrime thriller never fully lives up to its exciting premise.
Rating: ★★★½☆ (3.5/5)
Director: Avinash Arun Dhaware
Platform: JioHotstar
Episodes: 6
Cast: Arshad Warsi, Vir Hirani, Vikrant Massey, Mona Singh, Boman Irani
Release: July 3, 2026
When Rajkumar Hirani announced his OTT debut, expectations were naturally high.
This is the filmmaker behind Munna Bhai, 3 Idiots, and PK — someone who has built a career on making big, warm, crowd-pleasing films that somehow also say something meaningful about society. A cybercrime thriller tackling digital dangers, trolling, and online predators sounded like exactly the kind of subject he would handle with the right balance of humour and heart.
Pritam and Pedro deliver some of that. Just not consistently enough.
The story follows Pedro, played by Arshad Warsi, a boots-on-the-ground cop who has been transferred to the cybercrime cell as a punishment. He cannot stand anything digital, which makes him exactly the wrong person for the job.
Then Pritam, played by Vir Hirani, enters the picture — a young vacuum cleaner salesman by day and gifted hacker by night, who helps Pedro crack an ATM case in fifteen minutes. A reluctant partnership forms.
When a minister’s son goes missing after falling prey to a dangerous online game, the mismatched duo finds itself chasing a cybercriminal named Martin, played by Vikrant Massey, through a web of digital misdirection, ransomware and online manipulation.
The setup is genuinely promising.
Arshad Warsi is completely at home here. He plays Pedro with the deceptive ease that has always defined his best performances — funny on the surface, carrying real grief underneath. His Pedro is a man still processing the loss of a child, and that pain quietly shapes everything he does in the investigation. Warsi makes it look effortless, which is, of course, the most difficult kind of acting.
Vir Hirani makes a confident debut as Pritam. He keeps the performance natural and unforced, never seems to be trying too hard, and shares genuinely fun chemistry with Warsi. Their banter is the show’s consistent high point — two people with completely different approaches to everything, slowly finding a rhythm that works. For a first performance, it is a quietly impressive start.
Vikrant Massey as the antagonist Martin arrives late in the series and never quite gets enough screen time to become the genuinely threatening presence the story needs. He is mysterious rather than menacing, which works in parts but leaves the central conflict feeling lower-stakes than it should. Mona Singh is wasted in a role that the early episodes hint will matter more than it actually does.
The writing is where the show most consistently falls short.
The series struggles to commit to a single tone. It switches between light-hearted buddy comedy, emotional drama, and procedural cybercrime thriller without landing fully in any of those zones.
The emotional beats that should hit hardest — particularly around Pedro’s grief and Pritam’s own losses — pass by without the weight they deserve. The cybercrime elements are explained clearly and the show handles digital dangers with genuine social awareness, but the plotting around them relies on convenient coincidences and predictable investigative tropes.
Six episodes at roughly thirty-five minutes each should feel lean. Instead, some of it feels stretched, and there are stretches where the story circles back to territory it has already covered.
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Pritam and Pedro is watchable. It is breezy, occasionally charming, and has two leads whose company you genuinely enjoy. The Goa backdrop adds visual warmth and the social messaging around cyberbullying and online manipulation feels timely.
It is just not the smart, emotionally resonant show the subject and the filmmaker’s reputation both suggested it could have been.
Worth a weekend watch for Arshad Warsi. Just temper your expectations accordingly.
Pritam and Pedro is now streaming on JioHotstar. All 6 episodes available.