Cast: Munawar Faruqui, Krystle D’Souza, Saqib Ayub, Gulshan Grover, Raza Murad, Ashi Singh
Director: Farhan P. Zamma
Platform: On Amazon MX Player
Rating out 5: ★★★
First Copy begins in 1990s Mumbai, a city caught in that awkward adolescence between VHS tapes and the first shimmer of DVDs, between the dream machine of Bollywood and the streetside stalls that sold pirated fantasies for ten rupees a pop. This is Arif’s dominion: a man who believes in the purity of the hustle, if not the legality of it.
Munawar Faruqui, best known for reality TV, plays Arif with surprising gravity. In the teaser, cigarette dangling, he surveys his bootleg empire with the kind of romantic fatalism reserved for old gangsters and disgraced poets. He’s commanding and dangerous.
The show is directed and written by Farhan P. Zamma, who approaches the material with the solemnity of someone unpacking family secrets. This is a crime thriller, and it makes sure you know it. There’s crime. Then some more crime. Arif battles rival bootleggers, is hounded by producers and cops, and strolls into the familiar rise-and-fall arc.
Krystle D’Souza appears as Mona, meant to serve as conscience or compass, though in truth she’s more of a narrative ornament, echoing Arif’s moral failures without offering much of a challenge. She’s perfectly capable, but she’s not given a single moment that doesn’t revolve around the gravity of Arif. Supporting players like
Gulshan Grover, Meiyang Chang, and Raza Murad are deployed mostly as nostalgic cues. They look the part, and that’s about as far as the script lets them go.
Munawar, however, is the revelation, or at least, the pleasant surprise. He lacks the polish of the trained actor, but he brings something rarer: authenticity. He has the kind of presence that doesn’t beg for sympathy. His face does something when it’s not speaking, something believable. There’s a wiry unpredictability to him, and when the script allows, he delivers with rawness. It’s not a performance to blow you away but for ten episodes of TV, it holds.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the story around him. First Copy labours under the weight of its own genre. The moral geography is laid out in permanent marker: bootlegger vs capitalist vs corrupt cop. There are no shades of grey here, just a lot of loud, self-important black and white. Arif rises, then he’s betrayed, then he’s remorseful. The movements are correct, the beats are hit, but it’s all done without much subtlety.
There are moments that flirt with brilliance. Zamma’s direction has restraint. He knows how to let the camera wait. He allows the city to do some of the talking, narrow lanes, the flicker of tube lights on concrete, a sense of humidity and decay. Mumbai is rendered with care, not fetishised but observed. You can feel the tension of a city that’s always looking over its shoulder. The production design is thoughtful, the nostalgia not weaponised.
But the script doesn’t trust any of that. Every revelation is explained. Every decision is followed by a flashback or a flash-forward or a line of dialogue that kills whatever tension had been allowed to live. It’s a show that insists on making sure you get it, no room for ambiguity, no room for silence.
D’Souza, again, is serviceable, but underutilised. She has one or two scenes where you catch a flicker of something more complicated, but the script rushes past them. Grover could do this sort of gangster thing in his sleep, and at times, he very nearly does.
And yet, the show has something to say. It nudges at the idea of piracy not as crime, but as culture. As necessity. As rebellion. In a
media landscape now drunk on streaming platforms, it’s interesting to see a show ask what it cost for India to binge-watch its own stories. The series gestures at these questions, but it never really sits with them. It wants to look dangerous, but not actually be dangerous.
The technical work is tidy. The cinematographer gives Mumbai the right amount of grime and glow. The score hums along without intruding, though it rarely elevates. Pacing is patchy, some episodes hum, others sag.
Watching First Copy, I felt divided. One part of me appreciated the effort, the intention, the evocation of a specific, transitional time in Indian media. Another part felt deflated, as each plot point clicked into place with a sort of dutiful inevitability. And the third part wondered why we keep churning out crime stories that seem so afraid of silence, of surprise, of stillness.
Piracy is a fascinating subject. It’s subversion. It’s redistribution. It’s also theft, exploitation, desperation. The show touches on all of this, then backs away. It wants to have the conversation, but it’s too well-behaved to start a fight.
Still, credit where it’s due. Munawar’s casting was a risk, and it paid off. Zamma’s eye is careful, and the series has texture, even if it lacks torque. First Copy is decent television, good enough to watch, not quite good enough to keep. It passes the time. It passes judgment. It passes by.
