Bard of Blood · Season 1 · Episode 1 · 27 September 2019
S1E1 Episode 1
THE MOMENT Kabir's initial briefing sequence - the specific quality of Hashmi's performance establishing a character with operational history that the episode reveals methodically.
Bard of Blood's Netflix India premiere drops Emraan Hashmi's Kabir Anand into a Pakistan-based intelligence operation for a spy thriller that is more ambitious than its execution fully delivers. The episode establishes the trained-but-retired-agent premise and the Balochistan setting with enough competence that the series' subsequent failure to sustain it feels more like a budget problem than a creative one.
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
Updated
Bard of Blood's premiere earns its 5.8 score through the gap between its ambition and its delivery. The Red Chillies Entertainment production is Netflix India's most expensive series at its time of release, and the Balochistan setting is more geopolitically interesting than most Indian action thrillers. Emraan Hashmi's Kabir Anand is a competent spy thriller lead whose quiet intensity the show occasionally fails to give material worthy of it. The premiere's biggest achievement is establishing the procedural world with enough clarity that the series' later failures feel like disappointment rather than confusion. A mid-tier spy thriller debut that illustrates both the ambition and the limitations of 2019 Indian streaming production.