Eight episodes, most running close to fifty minutes, and a cast list long enough to need its own index. That is The Revolutionaries in one sentence, Nikkhil Advani's new period drama built around men and women the history chapters mostly skipped over.

The show is adapted from Sanjeev Sanyal's book Revolutionaries: The Other Side Of How India Won Its Freedom, and its spine is Rash Behari Bose, played by Bhuvan Bam. Bose spends his days as an assistant professor of chemistry in a Dehradun college, playing the loyal subject. At night he is building the bomb that, on December 23, 1912, gets hurled at Lord Hardinge's convoy. Hardinge survives. Bose doesn't stick around to find out. He flees, injured, to Benaras, where the Sanyal family nurses him back while quietly running their own underground network for the cause.

A Villain Before Jallianwala Bagh

The series' other big swing is Lt Col Reginald Dyer, played by Jason Shah, years before he becomes the name forever attached to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. His entire chase of Bose through Dehradun and Benaras is fictional, according to Bollywood Hungama's review, but it gives the show a spine of tension and lets it dig into what shaped Dyer before he became infamous.

Around that central chase, Sachindra Nath Sanyal, played by Rohit Saraf, wants out of the shadows and into the fight himself, and gets pulled into a romance with Pratibha, played by Pratibha Ranta, when she's introduced to him as a prospective match. Bagha Jatin, played by Gurfateh Singh Pirzada, rounds out the freedom-fighter roster, though the review notes he gets somewhat buried under the sheer number of characters vying for screen time.

The Casting Gamble That Pays Off

Handing Bhuvan Bam a role this heavy is a risk. He's built his name on comedy videos, not period drama, and the review calls it exactly that, a gamble. But it says the gamble lands, with Bam turning in the show's most memorable performance across its longest screen time. Saraf, too, gets to shed his usual image while still working in the romantic beats his audience shows up for. Ranta, coming off Laapataa Ladies, adds another well-drawn character to her run. Jason Shah's antagonist reportedly gets real nuance, and Paoli Dam as Pishima is singled out as something close to a revelation.

Where the show stumbles, per the review, is scale. Eight fifty-minute episodes is a lot to carry, and the writing, credited to Sanyuktha Chawla Shaikh, Akshita Wadhwana, Shobhit Narang and Rutvi Mehta, stretches thin trying to service every character. A love track between Sachindra and Pratibha develops too fast to fully convince. Songs and romance are fine on their own terms but occasionally pull against the realism the story is otherwise chasing. One supporting character, an ever-coughing Kirpal Singh played by Riyansh Taneja, tips into unintentional comedy rather than pathos.

Still, the highlights hold up: a tense chase through Dehradun, a raid in Benaras' Bengali Tola, a staged funeral, gunfire in Chandernagore and its fallout, and a climax the review calls memorable. Whether audiences stick through all eight episodes to get there is the real test now that the show is out.