AP Dhillon First of a Kind review: Prime Video series about Punjabi music phenom is all swag, little substance

You can count moments of insight like this on one hand. Because the majority of the show is dedicated to documenting, in the most non-intrusive manner, his meteoric rise to the top. Dhillon was essentially a pandemic find, just like Hasan Rahim and Ali Sethi. His first blockbuster song — “Brown Munde” — captured the hustle and spirit of South Asians across the world, and struck a chord back home in India. Everyone from gym lads to Bollywood celebrities was suddenly grooving to his music, an intoxicating melding of rustic lyrics and slick beats.

Who can forget Alia Bhatt and Ranveer Singh vibing at his Gurugram concert in 2021. It was quite literally the first time he’d performed live in his short career. This concert forms a significant part of the show’s narrative, especially episode three. While most musicians follow a fairly well-established rite of passage to the top — small clubs, theatres, and then, if they’re lucky, big arenas — Dhillon went straight from being an internet sensation to playing in front of thousands in his very first show.

But while First of a Kind tells us that this is what happened, we get only a vague idea of what Dhillon feels about it. There’s a lot of, ‘we had no idea what we were doing but we did it any way’ energy to this whole thing, and barely any moments of actual vulnerability. Perhaps the most effective scenes are the ones in which Dhillon remembers home, and alludes to the difficulties that so many Punjabi families have experienced over the years; difficulties that no doubt contributed to the mass exodus of youth from the state.

He talks about being raised single-handedly by his grandmother, who makes a brief appearance when he returns to India for the first time after having blown up online, and tears up when it strikes him that he probably doesn’t have much time left with her. There’s also a short scene in which Dhillon speaks with Sidhu Moose Wala on the phone, and later reflects on how his death affected him. The Gurugram concert seemingly went off without a hitch, but the show reveals that Dhillon was terrified at the time because of all the threats he’d been receiving from gangsters trying to extort money from him.

All this is far more interesting than the challenges of putting together arena tours. More than the shows themselves, what’s most effective about episodes three and four in particular is the evolving camaraderie between Dhillon and his crew. They literally started from a basement, united in a foreign country by a shared past, having recognised each other as misfits and poets amid a sea of uncertainty. Dhillon’s frequent collaborator and fellow Run-Up Records member Shinda Kahlon shows up as the John Lennon to his Paul McCartney. He’s behind most of the show’s occasional insights into the artistic process. We’re told, for instance, that Dhillon is also a master sound mixer, but we never see him actually doing this.

A key reason for this lack of depth is the absence of voices outside of Dhillon’s inner-circle. While we hear plenty from Kahlon and other close confidantes, only three outsiders show up to offer commentary on Dhillon’s rise and rise — a DJ, a journalist, and a Spotify executive. And none of them really has anything to say that we hadn’t gathered ourselves already. Or even if they did, it hasn’t been retained in the show. Dhillon’s music, and his journey, deserves a major documentary series; of that there is no doubt. But it needed to be better than this.

AP Dhillon: First of a Kind
Director – Jay Ahmed
Rating – 2.5/5