Riteish Deshmukh’s OTT debut, Pill on JioCinema, has everything at its core to make it a compelling medical thriller, from powerful pharmaceutical companies who want to 'rule the world' without thinking about the common people to “human guinea pigs” who just want to cure themselves and trust everything without questioning twice. While avoiding naming a real-life Pharmaceutical company, the series deftly manages to encapsulate the ways in which wealthy manufacturers influence politicians, journalists, whistleblowers and drug regulators and play fast-and-loose with the regulatory checks to get their harmful drugs on the shelf.
Disclaimer: The movie is not based on a true story.
The show begins with a close-up of a doctor at Patiala's Sohni Hospital who is under pressure to fabricate a drug test report for not just 100 patients, but 4,000. The opening scene of the story establishes the mood for the rest of it.
Hospitals are paid by a group of people to falsify patient records in order to get access to a medication study. They get their pharmaceuticals into the market by bribing people all around the nation, including the medicine body. But when Anshul Chauhan's character Gursimrat Kaur shows up in the lab of Forever Cure Pharma to perform an inspection, suspicions are aroused. Her crew is not permitted on the property. Upon entering, though, a man leaves with a file and tosses it into a landfill.
The file finds its way to a landfill, where it is discovered by a young reporter, Noor Khan (Akshat Chauhan). Noor thinks he has struck gold, something that will rescue him from the dullness of his entertainment photojournalism work, so he visits every doctor to find out what the information in the file means. As word gets out like wildfire, he is attacked. When the issue reaches Dr. Prakash Chauhan, the Deputy Medicine Controller (Riteish Deshmukh), he makes the decision to act independently. Through laboratory testing, he finds out that the medications are subpar and have been rushed through trials and approved illegitimately. He decides to take on the pharmaceutical industry and all of the middlemen engaged in this fraud on his own.
Riteish Deshmukh made his OTT debut with this show, and he stole show. He embodied the character from the very first scene, staying loyal to the original and quietly criticizing those who are acting immorally and harming the average person. Conversely, Pavan Malhotra expertly portrays the evil, complex, erratic, and frightening pharmaceutical tycoon Brahm Gill. Sometimes, nothing says more than his looks or words as he ignores illegal activity occurring within his organization.
This eight-part series reveals the ways in which wealthy manufacturers influenced politicians, journalists, whistleblowers, drug regulators, and journalists. The series boldly confronts harsh realities perfectly encapsulated by the statement - "File mein jab page blank ho aur neeche officer ka signature ho, iska matlab hai ki woh signature national interest mein liya gaya hai."