Mar 10 2026.
views 14Rihaab Mowlana
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This week’s Watchlist came together in two very different ways: one show I’d been waiting years to see return, and one film I watched almost by accident. The Family Man Season 3 arrived with sky-high expectations after two strong seasons, while Lucky Baskhar was simply the Netflix title I kept seeing and ignoring until curiosity finally won. One had a lot to prove. The other had nothing to lose.
Lucky Baskhar was a very random watch for me. It had been sitting on my Netflix homepage for weeks, the kind of film you keep scrolling past while telling yourself you’ll get to it eventually. And then one evening, I finally hit play, mostly out of curiosity. Turns out, that was a very good call.
Lucky Baskhar begins in the most painfully familiar place imaginable: a hardworking middle-class man realising that doing everything “right” still leaves him broke and overlooked. Baskhar, played by Dulquer Salmaan, is a bank cashier in 1990s Bombay who gets passed over for a promotion and slowly starts dipping his toes into financial schemes that are… let’s say, ethically flexible. At first, it’s small. A little shortcut here, a clever workaround there. Before long, though, the man is swimming in the kind of high-stakes financial chaos that makes you sit there thinking, “This is definitely illegal… but also kind of impressive.”
The film does something sneaky: it makes you root for him. Even when you know he’s committing crimes that would send a normal person into a mild panic attack, you’re still quietly hoping he pulls it off. Dulquer plays Baskhar with that disarming smile that makes him look like the most trustworthy guy in the room, which is exactly why the scams work so well. The story keeps teasing the idea that he’s about to get caught, only to reveal that he’s been three steps ahead the entire time.
What really sells it, though, is the world around him. The film starts firmly in middle-class reality - family obligations, money stress, relatives who always need loans - and that grounding makes Baskhar’s transformation feel believable. By the time the scams get bigger and the stakes get ridiculous, you’ve already understood the emotion behind it.
Lucky Baskhar isn’t really interested in lecturing you about right and wrong. It’s more like a sly little thought experiment about ambition, survival, and the moment someone decides the rules were never designed for them in the first place. And honestly? It’s a pretty entertaining ride.
The Family Man is one of those rare Indian streaming shows I’ve genuinely loved from the beginning. Season 1 was excellent, Season 2 somehow managed to raise the bar, and by the time Farzi showed up in the same universe, I was both intrigued and mildly nervous. I didn’t want this brilliant little corner of Indian streaming to suddenly turn into some sprawling cinematic universe situation. Still, Farzi turned out to be good enough that I was more than ready for Season 3, which, to be fair, Amazon kept teasing us about for what felt like years.
This time, Srikant Tiwari (Manoj Bajpayee) finds himself dealing with yet another massive national conspiracy, this one unfolding partly in Nagaland. The show still has the elements that made it work in the first place: Bajpayee remains excellent as the perpetually exhausted spy trying to save the country while also managing his increasingly chaotic home life. The action is slick, the tension is there, and when the show gets going, it can still pull you in.
The problem is that it takes a while to get there. Season 3 spends a lot of time circling its plot before really committing to it, and the result is a storyline that feels more complicated than it needs to be. There are secret agencies, billionaires, weapons deals, political intrigue, and a villain who could have been fascinating but never quite gets the depth he deserves. Compared to the first two seasons, which built tension carefully and then delivered satisfying payoffs, this one sometimes feels like it’s juggling too many ideas at once.
That said, it’s still The Family Man. Even when it’s a bit stretched or messy, the performances hold it together, and the familiar mix of espionage and domestic drama is still entertaining. It may not reach the highs of the earlier seasons, but if you’ve been following Srikant Tiwari’s journey from the start, you’ll probably stick around anyway, if only to see what chaos he gets dragged into next.
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