Streaming entertainment in India has truly come of age in recent years. 2023 has been a particularly great year for Indian OTT content. The year witnessed a huge number of excellent shows releasing on myriad streaming platforms.
The impressive assortment of shows straddled diverse genres and remarkable storylines. Digital audiences have been treated to crime chronicles, comic capers, mafia memoirs, erotic escapades, and even hair-raising horror dramas thrown in for good measure.
With so many scintillating shows on streaming platforms, each one better than the next, it is certainly a tough task to choose the Top Ten Web Series Of 2023.
But choose we must!
So here is our Binged Yearender: Top 10 Best Indian Web Series Of 2023 –
10. The Hunt For Veerappan – Netflix
Netflix’s The Hunt For Veerappan is sharp, precise and perfectly paced. The narrative it weaves around the notorious bandit’s rise, rule and fall is disturbing, but riveting at the same time. The gritty and compelling docuseries delves deep into the mind and making of the dreaded gangster through archival footage and numerous one-on-one chats with prominent people associated with Veerappan’s life.
9. Dahaad – Prime Video
Prime Video and Excel Entertainment’s ‘Dahaad’ is a serial killer murder mystery, set in small-town Rajasthan. More than the crime drama, what makes Dahaad a riveting watch is the searing social commentary at the heart of the story, and the damning indictment of the ills plaguing patriarchal Indian society.
8. Farzi – Prime Video
Prime Video and Raj & DK’s Farzi is set in the backdrop of the widespread menace of counterfeit currency in India. A gifted but struggling sketch artist Sunny (Shahid Kapoor) is caught up in the world of crime, and uses his artistry to design and publish fake currency that looks and feels as good as the original. Farzi is a terrific addition to the evolving web series space in India.
7. The Railway Men – Netflix
Netflix’s ‘The Railway Men’ is set in the backdrop of the devastating 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy in the Union Carbide factory located in the centre of the city. It recounts the bravery of unsung heroes of the tragedy who showed unprecedented courage to steer as many victims to safety as they can.
6. Guns And Gulaabs – Netflix
Netflix and Raj & DK’s ‘Guns And Gulaabs’ is set in small town India of the nineties. The sleepy little town of Gulaabganj is a hotbed of crime, owing to its vast cultivation of opium. A big-ticket drug deal draws out the daggers amongst rival drug gangs.
5. Scoop – Netflix
Netflix and Hansal Mehta’s ‘Scoop’ tells the story of an ambitious crime reporter, Jagruti Pathak (Karishma Tanna), who is falsely implicated in the murder case of her fellow journalist and thrown into prison after being accused of conspiring with gangster Chhota Rajan in the murder.
4. Trial By Fire – Netflix
Netflix’s Trial By Fire is a compelling watch, a riveting retelling of the devastating fire that engulfed Uphaar Cinema in June 1997, and the relentless 25-year-long fight for justice, of bereaved parents Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy, who lost both their teenaged kids in the fire.
3. Rocket Boys Season 2 – Sony LIV
Sony LIV’s ‘Rocket Boys’ centres on the endeavours of Indian science’s towering luminaries, Homi J Bhabha (Jim Sarbh) and Vikram Sarabhai (Ishwak Singh), and their struggles to establish India’s nuclear and space programs, respectively. The story gets more intense in Rocket Boys Season 2, as the CIA, along with moles in the Indian establishment, attempt to scuttle India’s ambitious project to create its own nuclear bomb.
2. Kohrra – Netflix
Netflix’s ‘Kohrra’ is set in the backdrop of rural Punjab. A young NRI is found dead in a rural field just days before his wedding. When two world-weary cops, the veteran Balbir Singh (Suvinder Vicky) and his young subordinate Amarpal Garundi (Barun Sobti), dig deeper into the murder, it opens up a stink-hole of conspiracies and secrets.
1. Jubilee – Prime Video
Prime Video and Vikramaditya Motwane’s ‘Jubilee’ centres on the early days of Hindi cinema in Bombay, the city of dreams. Blending fact with fiction, the series tells the story of the rise of Hindi film stars of yesteryears, juxtaposed against the glamour, deceit, betrayals, manipulations that were a part of filmdom back in the forties and fifties.