Farzi, the first web series starring Shahid Kapoor and Vijay Sethupathi, has accomplished a new feat. With an estimated 37 million viewers, it has surpassed all other Indian online series in terms of viewership. Farzi, which was released on Prime Video earlier this year, stars Sethupathi as a gun-happy cop and Kapoor as a street-smart crook.
According to a research by Ormax Media, Farzi ranked first among the original SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) programmes that Indian viewers viewed the most this week. It outperformed shows like Jeetendra Kumar’s Panchayat 2 (31.6 million viewers), Ajay Devgn’s Rudra (35.2 million viewers on Disney+ Hotstar), Pankaj Tripathi’s Mirzapur season 2 (32.5 million viewers on Disney+ Hotstar), Pankaj Tripathi’s Criminal Justice (29.1 million viewers on Disney+ Hotstar), and Aditya Roy Kapur’s most recent thriller The Night Manager. (27.2 million viewers).
By the time Farzi’s run is complete, the nation will have watched it more than 37 million times. Ormax Media bases its calculation of audience viewership on the number of persons who viewed at least one full episode of a show or at least 30 minutes of a movie within eight weeks of its debut. Repeat views are not counted.
Farzi features Raashi Khanna, Kay Kay Menon, Regina Cassandra, Zakir Hussain, Bhuvan Arora, Amol Palekar and Kubbra Sait.
Shubhra Gupta of the Indian Express reviewed the film, “The series slips in the fact of demonetisation, and of how corruption was meant to be curbed with the new notes, by slyly giving us corrupt, power-hungry netas (one is an MLA from, um, Gujarat; the other one, played by Zakir Hussain, gets a lot more screen time). An enthusiastic rookie (Raashii Khanna), also a smart cookie, joins the ‘farzi’ note busters, and often strikes off on her own, despite being explicitly told not to play a lone hand.”
