‘Glory’ (2026) Netflix Series Review - Frustrating, Fascinating, and Wildly Uneven

It has been a long time since an Indian Netflix series has both frustrated and fascinated me. Then again, it has also been a long time since an Indian Netflix series has come close to the initial "experimental days" of the OTT. I am referring to those days when the platform would take wild swings with releases like Sacred Games, Leila, and Ghoul. Not all of them were hits, and most of them had parts that worked better than the whole. Still, the output used to be interesting, giving the impression of a young child trying to find a fresh, unique voice. Of course, that child unfortunately grew up to become mainly generic, derivative, and unimaginative. Forget narrative risks—even visually, the shows and movies ended up looking boring.

I am not attempting to imply that Glory fully arrives bearing a "fresh, unique voice." It does, however, try to distinguish itself from other Netflix India offerings by pursuing an ambitious objective. The first indicator of that "distinctive identity" is Glory's fusion of sports drama and detective mystery. This is exactly the kind of idea that probably earns enthusiastic cheers in a corporate meeting. One genre supplies adrenaline while the other keeps viewers guessing. It's a perfect combo for streaming platforms eager to rake in big numbers and keep subscribers bingeing. The issues, alas, emerge during execution. In Glory's case, the sports drama turns out to be markedly inferior to the detective mystery. Blame the impersonal direction, which fails to deliver an adrenaline rush or impress us with elegant choreography.

The action blocks are disappointingly basic. To understand what is missing, consider the fistfight and boxing sequences from Bloodhounds. In that South Korean thriller, violence is filmed with a sense of exaltation and choreographic joy. A great deal of attention is paid to both the physicality of the locations and the physicality of the characters—not only to sync them logically but also to render their movements with a balletic grace that offers genuine sensory delight. Moreover, in Bloodhounds, every punch looks painful, both physically and emotionally, because the characters discuss specific muscles that have been injured, then rest and recover after fights. There is a sequence in Glory where Dev (Divyendu Sharma) and Ravi (Pulkit Samrat) move from one room to another, kicking and hitting goons as they fight their way to the exit, and it gives us a glimpse of what these action scenes could have been in the hands of directors with stronger visual instincts. Instead, directors Karan Anshuman and Kanishk Varma rely on cliches like quick, breathless cuts to generate chaos and kick. Yet one feels almost nothing when people are shot or knocked down onscreen. In the first episode, when Dev and Ravi go up against some men at a gas station, we are able to notice the fakeness of the design. We recognize how carefully the extras charge toward the brothers according to instructions from the filmmaking team.

The only fight scene that does anything emotionally is the boxing match between Ravi and Raka (Kunal Thakur) near the end of the series. It is the culmination of so many plot points and emotional tensions that we are naturally on the edge of our seats. Those strengths arise from the detective thriller component of Glory, which ultimately saves it from crashing. The central mystery—who killed Nihal (Yugam Sood) and Gudiya (Jannat Zubair Rahmani)—is juicy, engrossing, and enticing. There are red herrings, all right, but they are not cheap. They are deliberate, calculated, and embedded into the architecture of the story. The series is cleverly conceived. Its twists and turns are genuine page-turners, complete with a finale that makes you scream. There are other noteworthy surprises too. Take, for instance, how Glory reveals a wife's infidelity to her husband and how that confrontation plays with your expectations of how such a scene should unfold. Or consider what happens when Dev goes to a fort to track a lead and finds a woman who...no, the details are too good to spoil.

One of the best things about the final reveal is that it makes you recognize the excellence of Suvinder Vicky all over again. Yes, his excellence was never in doubt to begin with, but I am speaking more specifically about the world of Glory and how the ultimate revelation forces you to reconsider his performance in hindsight. The shock arrives from two directions: the truth itself and the steps taken by Vicky's Raghubir Singh. In one of Glory's early episodes, a man praises the boxing culture of Shaktigarh while his wife dismisses it as a factory. Shaktigarh might as well be Haryana's Kota, with boxing serving as its IIT equivalent. No wonder these boxers, much like IIT aspirants, obsessively talk about reaching the Olympics, and this journey is portrayed as tough, stressful, and brutally competitive. Hence, after a while, you naturally begin to wonder whether the killer is operating according to the logic adopted by Yoo Man-su in No Other Choice. In this high-pressure environment, what is being peddled is a warped notion of glory. The hunger for Olympic gold produces fervent monsters who erase the boundaries of morality. This makes the show resemble a dark comedy about obsessive dreamers consumed by career-related fantasies.

Anshuman and Varma, however, never quite get the tone right. When Raghubir tells Dev and Ravi that Gudiya was planning to run away from home, and Dev says that running away seems fashionable in this family, Raghubir irritably replies that Gudiya was planning to elope with a boy. I wanted to laugh at this response; it sounded genuinely funny. The problem is that I am not sure the directors intended that reaction because the comic mood not only feels accidental, it also appears abruptly. With the joke involving Heavyweight Paratha and Super Heavyweight Paratha, the intentions are clearer, but the humor still does not land. Sikandar Kher's character is always present in a dusty mine, which makes you wonder whether he has a home or simply sleeps in the sand like the animal he is supposed to be. Again, the directors accidentally generate humor. If only they possessed the wit to fully embrace this show as pulp, we would have far less to complain about.

The other eye-rollingly lame aspect of Glory is how desperate it becomes to underline certain points. A policeman constantly tells his colleague that he is a good man, a good friend, so that certain news can land more effectively. But the virtues he praises are already too evident to warrant such blunt repetition. In another episode, we learn about Raghubir and Viju's (Ashutosh Rana) point of conflict only minutes before a development designed to hit us emotionally. If the creators truly trusted the audience, they would have planted this detail earlier instead of deploying it like a button for instant emotional response. Their intentions are so transparent that the scene collapses. More puzzling, though, is the directors' inability to shoot even basic moments credibly—like Ravi's introduction, where the camera is supposed to lustfully gaze at his sweaty body. They botch something even a mediocre filmmaker should be able to execute competently.

Samrat is perhaps the weakest link in the series. When he is tied to the back of a vehicle and dragged to the police station, he looks as uncomfortable as a guest forced to drink coffee with less sugar than he would have liked. Sayani Gupta is mostly wasted, Divyendu is fine, and Kashmira Pardeshi sneaks up on you quietly. Pardeshi, as Bharti, is perfectly sexy. She understands how men look at her, and she weaponizes that awareness so cunningly that it becomes one of the show's strongest twists. Bharti disarms everyone with her mixture of innocence and sensuality. She is intoxicating; she is stealthy. She kills with her beauty. Bharti is Glory's sweet poison. She might as well be its Poison Ivy.

Final Score- [6/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times