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Cast: Paramveer Singh Cheema, Ranvir Shorey, Smita Patil, Vijay Kumar, Shekhar Suman, Anjann Srivastava and others
Creator: Shreyansh Pandey
Director: Shreyansh Pandey & Ashish Shukla
Streaming On: Prime Video
Language: Hindi
Runtime: 7 episodes of 40 minutes each
There is a very thin, highly sophisticated line between a smart, slick con-artist comedy and a gloriously tone-deaf show that glorifies financial crimes. When the trailer for The Pyramid Scheme dropped, I was intrigued because it brought back a lot of memories of the past! The schemes that some of the relatives used to demonstrate to our parents, and they would be visibly lured. Sometimes, they would try their luck, and sometimes they wouldn’t. But mostly they would stand cheated. Those were the days of the 90s!
Backed by TVF, the show had the potential to be something like The Wolf of Wall Street meets Scam 1992, injected with the signature rusty and raw humor of North India. Instead, what director Akhil Sachdeva and his team have delivered across seven exhausting episodes is a loud, messy, and fundamentally confused web series that takes the crushing reality of a fraud scheme and sells it as a funny and humorous sitcom.
The Pyramid Scheme Review: What’s It About:
Set across the city of Haridwar, the narrative tracks Goldy (Paramveer Singh Cheema), a highly charismatic, smooth-talking boy from a struggling middle-class family who stumbles upon the dangerous world of Multi-Level Marketing. Desperate to rewrite his bank accounts, he gets trapped by a corporate vulture, Jumbolife. Goldy, in turn, traps a struggling music teacher, Manoj (Ranvir Shorey), and launches a multi-tier investment scheme targeting students, small-town housewives, retired government officials, and naive youth.
As the money flows in, Goldy transforms Manoj into a cult-like figure, manipulating thousands into investing their life savings into a black hole of empty promises. Despite facing competition from a high-level leader of JumboLife (Shekhar Suman), its founder (Ravi Behl), and a group of greedy allies (Vijay Kumar, Smita Bansal), Goldy’s group of The Pyramid Scheme grows rapidly, but the comedy starts drying up, exposing a dark underbelly that the show’s writers are too afraid to fully confront.
The Pyramid Scheme Review: What Works:
Every scam begins with a dream – A bigger house, A better life, and Financial freedom. The Pyramid Scheme understands this beautifully. At least initially. The series follows individuals who find themselves pulled into a rapidly expanding network promising wealth, success, and luxury. What starts as an opportunity gradually reveals itself to be a carefully constructed mechanism fuelled by manipulation, desperation, ambition, and greed.
The setup is fascinating because pyramid schemes are very common! Unlike bank robberies or murders, these crimes often happen in broad daylight. Victims voluntarily participate. Families destroy themselves. Friendships collapse. It has a rich, dramatic content! But that is it. TVF’s show, unfortunately, does not know what to do with this opportunity!
The Pyramid Scheme Review: Star Performance:
If The Pyramid Scheme manages to hold its ground at all, it is entirely due to the cast. Fresh off his towering breakthrough in Chamak, followed by Tere Ishk Mein, Paramveer Singh Cheema breathes immense helplessness in a confident and struggling Goldy! He plays the smooth-talking conman with a brilliant, swaggering charm that makes it entirely believable why thousands would blindside themselves into giving him their hard-earned money. His character feels believable because he never plays him as an outright villain. Instead, he creates someone who gradually begins believing his own lies.
Ranvir Shorey’s contrast underconfident teacher Manoj gets a brilliant character arc as he turns into a motivational speaker for this business model, making a cult of his own through concerts and music about the themes of The Pyramid Scheme! He brings his experience to this shoddy story! Even when the writing becomes inconsistent, Shorey remains engaging.
Vijay Kumar contributes effectively to the ensemble while Smita Bansal and Ravi Behl make the most of limited screentime. Shekhar Suman possesses the charm required to lead this con-world, but his character is not explored well! Clearly, the cast performs significantly better than the screenplay.
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The Pyramid Scheme Review: What Doesn’t Work:
The fundamental flaw of the show is its ethical compass – or rather, the total lack of one. The writing team attempts to treat a deeply devastating, life-destroying financial crime as a harmless, light-hearted jugaad or entrepreneurial hustle to become rich in an easy way! The series actively avoids treating the fraud scheme as a punishable criminal offense; the narrative never builds real stakes. It relies on Daulat Ka Nasha but never discusses the repercussions!
By the middle of the season, the show loses its plot completely! It turns itself into a corporate con-show and weirdly morphs into a low-rent version of Bobby Deol’s Aashram. Ranvir Shorey’s Manoj Sir turns motivational seminars into a full-blown cult community! The show gets trapped in a creative identity crisis. It wants the sinister cult energy of Baba Nirala’s empire, but it still wants to remain a safe, family comedy. This halfway approach results in a flat, monotonous narrative loop that repeats the same seminar-and-betrayal arc across multiple episodes.
The Pyramid Scheme Review: Last Words:
The biggest problem with The Pyramid Scheme is that it seems deeply impressed by the people running the scam. Far more impressed than being interested in the people being scammed. And that becomes a problem almost immediately. The writing repeatedly presents fraudsters as rebels, clever entrepreneurs, misunderstood visionaries, or accidental antiheroes. But fraud is not entrepreneurship, and exploitation is not ambition!
The Pyramid Scheme is a major missed opportunity. It has the cast, the scale, and the perfect real-world inspiration to deliver a defining Indian business satire. Instead, it gets heavily bankrupt by a confused script that thinks financial ruin is a laughing matter. It has a confused tone. There is a lack of moral clarity. It is not bothered by the victims, leading to an end that feels more fascinated by fraud than criticizing it!
The show understands how pyramid schemes work. It just doesn’t understand how it kills middle-class dreams and breaks them financially, trapping them in a loop they can never break! Somewhere along the way, the series becomes too enchanted by its con artists, turning into a crime drama that never calls crime a crime.
2 stars.
For more reviews of shows on OTT, stay tuned to Koimoi.
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