Once again, like last year, it felt that most of the good stuff was coming out on streamers, leaving Bollywood far behind. With most viewers adopting that dreaded phrase, oh we’ll watch it on OTT ( for movies releasing in theatres), opting instead for some of the smart original shows produced by streaming platforms, movie mavens will have to work doubly hard to get enough bums-on-seats in 2025.

Here are some of my top shows, in no particular order. It was hard to zero in on just five because there were several contenders, so I would consider the ones just below not as also-rans, but the just-abouts.

IC 814 The Kandahar Hijack

Director Anubhav Sinha jammed Vijay Varma into the cockpit of a hijacked plane, miraculously getting him to look clean-shaven during the harrowing week-long hijack depicted in the series, based on a real-life incident in December 1999. It is a survival drama fronted by Hindi film industry’s real stars, who’ve decisively left the big screen pretenders far behind, Varma being very much in that category. The others include Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapoor, Manoj Pahwa, Arvind Swamy, as they take us from Kathmandu to Kandahar, giving us the inside story of the events (based on Captain Devi Sharan’s book, Flight Into Fear) as they unfolded over those tense seven days.

Predictably, IC 814 turned controversial, as real-life portrayals tend to do: did it deliberately set out to show the then BJP government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee in ‘Bad Light’ (a favourite phrase of naysayers down the ages) , or was it just a realistic portrayal of the confusion getting confounded in those high-level war-rooms? The mud-slingers had their fun, but those who watched it objectively, present company included, came away knowing a bit more than we did going on.

Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhein 2
You want lasting obsessions? Humans being pulped? Characters struggling with doing the right thing in the face of bad people doing bad things? Siddhartha Sengupta stays on track with the dark, pulpy vibe of his story and setting, which turned his first season into a guilty pleasure for many of us.

The return of Tahir Raj Bhasin, Anchal Singh, Shweta Tripathi, Arunoday Singh and, not to forget, Saurabh Shukla vamping it up for all he’s worth, in a gripping season where the pace makes you overlook the loops, just as they ought in a series like this, makes you believe in desi thrillers. Most storytellers don’t go all the way in making their characters do things that will make you shudder. Here Tahir Raj Bhasin’s Vikrant picks up an axe, and.. wait, spoiling it for you, if you haven’t watched already.

Lootere

Created by Hansal Mehta and Shailesh R Singh, is as international as it can get. A Ukrainian ship is hijacked by Somali pirates , and the sailors as well as the negotiators include people from different nationalities, India, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Somalian. Directed by Jai Mehta, with Rajat Kapoor, Vivek Gomber, Amruta Khanvilkar, Martial Batchamen, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Gaurav Sharma, Chirag Vora among others, and lifted by a cracking theme song by Achint Thakkar, ‘Lootere’ proves that Indians can tell stories set in global hot-spots. Branching out from the usual locations can create welcome difference in tone and texture.

Poacher

Richie Mehta’s Poacher takes us into the murky world of those who prey upon innocent animals for dirty profit. The dots are painstakingly connected between those who kill majestic elephants in the wild, farming them for their precious ivory tusks. The actors live their roles. Chief among them are Nimisha Sajayan who never cracks a smile, the affable Roshan Mathew, and the committed Dibyendu Bhattacharya as well as Kani Kusruti in a too brief-role. You know that these saviours of the forest are on the side of the angels and the bad guys won’t get away.

Shot on location in the jungles in Southern India where these beautiful animals are tracked and shot gives you a sense of the enormity of the crime, and draws a bead on the bigger sinners, who order the killings from faraway cities. Poacher is powerful, and moving.

Call me Bae

I’m going to cheat and divvy up one spot amongst two radically different shows, Call Me Bae and Freedom At Midnight. The former is set in the here-and-now, with poor little rich Bella being thrown out of her husband’s home on a rainy night– Ananya Panday was born to play this part—and instead of sinking in puddles of self-pity, Beautiful Bae picks up the pieces, and launches forth into the big, bad world.

It is supremely silly, the perfect tone of this kind of story. It’s got its froth and frills (ooh those designer bags, and dresses, and how many LV cases does Bae have?) , but its also a show about a girl coming into her own, despite herself. The hypocrisy of high Delhi society is contrasted with the can-do spirit of hustling Mumbai is up there; Vir Das as a smarmy celebrity TV anchor is not as much fun as as the crackerjack he can be when doing real-life stand up, but the man makes you smile; buff men can be, yes, sweet people; girls can be friends. But Bae is best.

Freedom at Midnight

Nikhil Advani’s Freedom At Midnight is a show I would recommend as a must-watch. It isn’t perfect. It uses too much swelling background music, almost drowning out the action. Not all the actors fit into the legendary characters they play (the talented Sidhant Gupta, in particular, looks astonishingly like Nehru, but he also cannot get past the fact that he is twenty something playing a sixty year old). But the others, especially Arif Zakaria as Jinnah and Rajendra Chawla as Sardar Patel are spot on, and if you can ignore Chirag Vora’s sing-song lilt which veers towards slight exaggeration, he makes you believe in his Gandhi.

Based mostly on the book of the same name by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, the series gives us not-so-well-known details of the shenanigans that took place at a time when the British had to swallow the fact that their time was up. The events leading up to the bloody Partition were in play : Jinnah was adamant for a nation for Muslims, Gandhi was equally set on a free country which belonged to all, and between the two, and the machinations of the wily British led by Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel were left with very little wiggle room.

With relentless revanchism being trained on our past, can we even make sense of our present? This show tells us, as much as any show made today can, how India came into being, on that stroke of the midnight hour.
And here are my other shows of 2024, chosen for consistency of solid story-telling, or breaking new ground: Gullak 4, with our trusty sutradhar giving us a fourth-go-around with our small town Mishras even if the complete absence of any other kind of India was much more glaring this time round. Panchayat 3, with Pradhanji and Sachivji and all the other denizens of Phulera going at each other, solving small problems while talking of big things. Big Girls Don’t Cry, which creates an all-girls boarding school atmosphere from an insider’s perspective, where mean girls and nice girls clash, and hormones are astir, and assignations are fixed, making it all feel real. Maamla Legal Hai, directed by Rahul Pandey, set in the lower courts of Delhi’s Patparganj, is about lawyers of all stripes– Ravi Kishan, Naila Grewal, Nidhi Bisht– who deal with cases of all kinds. Waack Girls, by Sooni Taraporevala, who takes the story to Kolkata, and give us a bunch of young women trying to find their true selves through a dance form which was born out of precisely that intention, in the gay clubs on the US West Coast in the 70s. The dancing is energetic, and despite some niggles, it has a welcome freshness.
Which is the one thing that the much-anticipated Mirzapur 3 lacked in spades. The bad boys and girls roaming about Kaleen Bhaiyya’s territory couldn’t manage a single thing which spelled new. Time for them to find a perch in the movies ; maybe they can re-discover their mojo on the big screen? Shows becoming movies, why not? Full circle time, in 2025.