Cast: Bhumi Pedneka, Ishaan Khatter, Zeenat Aman, Sakshi Tanwar, Vihaan Samat, Kavya Trehan, Sumukhi Suresh, Nora Fatehi, Lisa Mishra and Udit Arora
Directors: Priyanka Ghose and Nupur Asthana
Platform: Released on Netflix 9 May
Star rating out of 5: ★1/2
There’s nothing worse than being served a dish that thinks it’s fine dining when it’s barely a sandwich. Netflix’s The Royals wants to be a grand feast of high society and slow-burn romance, but instead you get recycled soap opera tropes, covered in melodrama and served with a side of cringe.
It fancies itself a grand, sweeping romance, part Bridgerton, part Succession, with a dash of Bollywood opulence, but instead what it resembles is a soap opera that tries to show heritage and charm but is nowhere close.
Right out of the gate, the show commits the biggest sin in storytelling: exposition so heavy it sinks the whole ship. It’s like the writer has cornered you at a party and starts telling you the family history before you’ve even had a chance to take off your coat.
I’m not against a little setup, but there’s a difference between building a world and burying your audience in bullet points.
Visually, The Royals wants to look rich, but it’s overlit to death. Every scene is overtly bright and beautified which has no actual purpose for the story. Shadows?
Mood? Forget it. Instead, you get flat, gleaming rooms filled with stilted dialogue and dramatic music cues that feel ripped straight from a ‘90s Indian soap.
As for the romance? There’s none. Ishaan Khatter and Bhumi Pednekar might look good on paper, but their chemistry onscreen is cold and robotic. You don’t root for them. You don’t feel for them. You just sort of wait for the next overacted confrontation, the next brooding stare to distract you from the fact that nothing real is happening.
Everything is on-the-nose. Nothing is allowed to breathe. Subtlety has been gagged, bound, and locked in a trunk somewhere in this fictional kingdom its set in. Characters spell out their motives like a bad PowerPoint pitch. Emotional beats are hammered home with no grace. It’s a complete shamble.
There is, occasionally, the flicker of something better – usually in the form of Zeenat Aman, who wanders through this parade of polyester passion with the sort of grace that reminds you what real screen presence looks like. But these moments are rare.
The Royals wants to say something about legacy, about modernity and tradition, about love under pressure. But it says it in big, blocky, underlined font, and then says it again just in case you missed it.
In the end, this isn’t royal. It’s costume jewellery: shiny, loud, and hollow.
