Cat (TV series)
A former police informant seeks revenge in 1990s Punjab.
Last updated
Cat, written in all capital letters, is a Punjabi-language crime thriller series from India that debuted in 2022. Created for Netflix by Balwinder Singh Janjua, Rupinder Chahal, Anil Rodhan, and Jimmy Singh, the show features a cast including Randeep Hooda, Suvinder Vicky, Hasleen Kaur, Geeta Agarwal Sharma, Dakssh Ajit Singh, Danish Sood, Jaipreet Singh, Sukhwinder Chahal, KP Singh, and Kavya Thapar. It marks Hooda's first streaming series and Netflix's debut original in Punjabi.
Plot
During the 1990s insurgency in Punjab, Gurnam once worked as a police CAT. He later gets his brother Sunny out of a drug case with officer Sehtab Singh’s help.
Sehtab then hires Gurnam again to spy on city drug operations. While on this job, Gurnam learns that Sehtab is in league with Baljit Singh Rajpuria, the man who killed Gurnam’s parents. This discovery makes Gurnam furious, and he drops his original mission to focus solely on avenging his parents.
Reception
Anuj Kumar for The Hindu wrote that in the beginning, Randeep seems to be surrounded by lesser actors but as the series progresses, the earthiness of the characters renders a raw appeal, noting that Suvinder aces the part of the two-faced police officer, Dakssh Ajeet Singh is absolutely believable as the sportsman-turned-criminal, and Abhishant Rana delivers the goods as the young Gurnam, with the ever-reliable Pramod Pathak as the slimy cop, and that the performances are in sync with the locations, dialect, background score, and editing pattern and have not been dressed up to match the perceived global taste of the streaming audience. Troy Ribeiro for The Free Press Journal gave a 4/5 star rating and wrote that diving deep into the skin of the character, it is Abhishant Rana’s intense performance as the young Gary that helps Randeep slip into the boots of Gurnam Singh with ease, and that both are outstanding in their respective roles, as they leave an indelible mark on the screen. Subhash K. Jha for Firstpost wrote that morality may go fly a kite, and that CAT tells us, the more we seek to find a moral centre to the world of crime the less the chances of getting anywhere close to a resolution to the moral dilemma. Abhimanyu Mathur for the Hindustan Times wrote that CAT’s novelty lies in its understanding of its setting, the earthiness of Punjab, and the lingo, of course, and that the show has its faults but that novelty and a stellar cast more than makes up for it.
Nandini Ramnath for Scroll.in wrote that the secondary roles are staffed by a memorable array of local actors who lend the series authenticity, including a delightful pair of twin hawala handlers, with props to the casting company Anti-Casting for finding these gents. Zinia Bandyopadhyay for India Today wrote that the series excels because it remains truthful with its depiction, and that it does not mince or hold anything back in showing violence and gore in a world where danger and deceit lurk at every corner and the series sets the tone right at the very beginning. Deepa Gahlot for Rediff.com wrote that the series has several Sikh characters and is in Punjabi, so many viewers might need subtitles, but the language, locations, production design, costumes bring an authenticity to CAT that is praiseworthy.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Cat (TV series) (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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