AP Dhillon — First Of A Kind review: AP Dhillon's showreel of his journey is inspiring in an inconsequential series
AP Dhillon — First Of A Kind review: AP Dhillon's showreel of his journey is inspiring in an inconsequential series
Cast: AP Dhillon, Shinda Khalon, Gurinder Gill
Directed by Jay Ahmed
Language: Hindi
Growing up in the 90s, I was hooked to the likes of singers like Kumar Sanu, Udit Narayan, and Sonu Nigam. As the millennium entered, the music industry entered a new era too, and we saw Shaan, KK, Kunal Ganjawala, and of course, Himesh Reshammya. Apologies to any singer who feels left out. We are now in 2023, where singers are buried even before they are born, the attention span is as minute as ant. I haven’t really followed much of AP Dhillon’s work, but the flashiness and fragrance of his success can be seen and felt on social media.
He has come out with a series on Amazon Prime Video called AP Dhillon: First Of A Kind. The title has a certain sense of duality, it’s reflective of both the star and his story. He was both in a Sikh family, and the series chronicles his passion for music, hunger for success, and thirst to inspire. Is it a documentary? Are there moments of creative liberties? Have they heightened the storytelling? Have they exaggerated the struggles from ebb to rise? Maybe, maybe not.
The series says that we know the music but we don’t know the man. This is his untold story. But it chooses to focus more on the fluffy and frothy side, never veering into the dark alleys like Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy, which shed light on singer and songwriter Any Winehouse’s chilling encounter with drug abuse. Of course, Dhillon’s may have been a journey far removed from this gloom, but the idea of pitching everything to perfection is exactly the series’ imperfection.
Maybe I’m being critical because I haven’t followed this man’s rise to the top. To see Salman Khan and Ranveer Singh at the screening of the series speaks volumes of where he has truly come and what he has remarkably achieved. But isn’t it too early to make a showreel on how he achieved what he did? He could indeed be one of a kind, can’t say the same about the series; one of those days when being a 90s kid is a bane.
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