Pritam and Pedro review: Rajkumar Hirani's OTT debut is a fun weekend watch

I went in expecting a one-episode sampler and came out having finished the whole thing in a single sitting. That is usually the only review that matters to me when I am deciding whether to recommend something to a friend, and by that measure, Pritam and Pedro earned its six episodes. It is Rajkumar Hirani’s first project as a creator and producer for streaming, and even with a slightly wobbly script, it is an easy, warm, funny watch that I would point anyone toward on a lazy weekend.

A quick note before the review proper, since I searched for this myself before watching: Pritam and Pedro is not a theatrical movie. It is a 6-episode web series that premiered on JioHotstar on 3 July 2026, under the Hotstar Specials banner. People keep calling it a movie anyway, myself included in conversation, probably because it is written and paced like one long Hirani film cut into episodes rather than a serialized show with cliffhangers. That distinction matters if you are planning your evening around it, so now you know going in.

What Pritam and Pedro is about

The setup is classic buddy-cop, just relocated to Goa and updated for the cybercrime era. Pedro Gonsalves, played by Arshad Warsi, is an old-school police officer whose career has stalled out. Pritam, played by newcomer Vir Hirani, is a young, tech-savvy coding expert introduced to the story after he cracks an ATM theft using nothing but his laptop and general cleverness. Impressed and more than a little threatened, Pedro pulls him into the department, and the two spend the season investigating a string of cyber-enabled crimes: thefts, kidnappings, and online scams that the local police force is not equipped to untangle on its own.

The season’s central case, a missing politician’s son, runs alongside a smaller, more personal thread about Pritam trying to recover his grandmother’s old tape recorder, which is the kind of small, sentimental detail Hirani has built an entire career on. It is corny in exactly the way his films have always been corny, and I mean that as a compliment.

Quick facts, if you just want the summary:

• Genre: Cybercrime comedy thriller
• Creator and producer: Rajkumar Hirani
• Director: Avinash Arun
• Writers: Rajkumar Hirani, Abhijat Joshi, Suyash Trivedi
• Episodes: 6
• Platform: JioHotstar
• Release date: 3 July 2026
• Cast: Arshad Warsi, Vir Hirani, Vikrant Massey, Mona Singh, Rajesh Sharma, Satyadeep Mishra, Shruti Marathe, with cameos from Sanjay Dutt, Virender Sehwag, and Boman Irani

The cast is what actually carries it

Arshad Warsi playing a grumpy, demoted cop is not a stretch for him, but that is precisely why it works. He has spent two decades being the funniest person in whatever scene he is in, and here he gets to be funny and a little worn down at the same time, which is a harder combination than it looks. Pedro is not written as a genius. He is written as a man who has seen enough of Goa’s small-time crime to be tired of it, and Warsi plays that tiredness with real comic timing instead of turning it into a joke about being old.

The bigger story going in was always going to be Vir Hirani, Rajkumar Hirani’s son, making his acting debut here as Pritam. Debuts like this invite skepticism, and I had some walking in. It mostly evaporated by the second episode. He is not a finished actor yet, there are moments where you can see the effort, but he has an easy screen presence and genuine chemistry with Warsi, and the show is smart enough to lean on that chemistry rather than ask him to carry heavy dramatic scenes alone.

Vikrant Massey and Mona Singh round out the cast well without ever threatening to steal focus from the central pair, which is exactly their job here. The cameos from Sanjay Dutt, Virender Sehwag, and Boman Irani are the kind of fun, low-stakes surprises that work better in a comedy than they would in something more serious.

What works

The Goa setting does a lot of quiet work. It gives the show a relaxed visual texture, lighthouses, police jeeps, beach roads, that a Mumbai-set cop show would not have had, and it fits the show’s unhurried, mostly comic tone better than a grittier city would have. The season also moves briskly. At six episodes, nothing overstays its welcome, and even the case-of-the-week structure in the middle stretch never drags long enough to become a chore.

Mostly, though, what works is the central relationship. A lot of buddy-cop shows lean on the two leads bickering, and this one does too, but there is real warmth underneath it, the kind that made Hirani’s earlier films rewatchable long after the plots stopped surprising anyone.

What does not quite land

I want to be honest here rather than just enthusiastic, because the show does have a real weakness: it treats cybercrime more as a plot device than as something it is genuinely curious about. An ATM heist gets cracked in a couple of minutes of screen time, and more than one case resolves without much actual investigative legwork on screen. If you come in wanting a sharp, technically grounded procedural, you will notice the hand-waving. A few reviewers pointed out that the hacking scenes lean on dated tropes, someone typing very fast at a keyboard, and that the show’s understanding of how cybercrime actually works has not been updated much past the mid-2010s.

Critical reception reflected that split. NDTV’s review landed at 4 out of 5, specifically praising Warsi and Vir Hirani’s performances. Others were harsher. The Indian Express gave it 2 out of 5, and The Quint’s review called it a dated exercise, arguing that Hirani’s habit of simplifying complicated issues for a mass audience, which worked so well in films like 3 Idiots and PK, reads as condescending rather than accessible when applied to a genre this modern.

I do not think that criticism is wrong, exactly. I just do not think it is the whole story either. Pritam and Pedro was never trying to be a rigorous cybercrime procedural, and judging it as if it failed at being one misses what it actually is: a warm, funny, low-stakes hangout show that happens to be dressed up in a crime-thriller plot. Judged on that, it mostly succeeds.

Should you watch it

If you go in wanting the next great Indian crime thriller, you might come away a little disappointed by how easily every case resolves. But if you go in wanting an evening with two likeable leads, a director who still knows how to land a joke and a sentimental beat in the same scene, and a setting pretty enough to make the whole thing feel like a small vacation, this delivers exactly that. It is comfort television, made by someone who has spent a career being very good at comfort.

My verdict

I would give Pritam and Pedro a solid 3.5 out of 5. It will not be remembered as Rajkumar Hirani’s best work, and it is genuinely not as sharp as it could have been about the very crimes it is built around. But it is funny, it is well cast, Vir Hirani announces himself as someone worth watching next time, and I finished all six episodes without once reaching for my phone. For a Friday night on JioHotstar, that is a real recommendation, not a backhanded one.