Best of 2025: Entertainment: OTT - Streaming Stars

Huma Qureshi | Delhi Crime, Season 3 | Netflix

 Smile, she says, even as she sends young women to doom, consigning them to years of sexual servitude. A sort of ghastly Ghislaine Maxwell with a pitch perfect Haryanvi accent, Huma Qureshi plays toxic Meena with flair, pouring her own wounds into a dark place, and emerging more monstrous and more unfeeling as the supplier of young girls to men with perverse tastes. In the third season of Delhi Crime, she leads a brilliant cast of stellar women such as Shefali Shah, Rasika Dugal and Mita Vasisht who juggle between what’s personal and what’s professional.

Amit Sial | The Hunt | SonyLIV 

Calm, collected, and calculating, he is the ultimate leader of the Special Inves­tigation Team formed to investigate the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Mixing fact and fiction, Nagesh Kukunoor’s The Hunt gives centrestage to an actor who has usually been brilliant in the margins. As DR Karthikeyan, Sial is quietly force­ful, holding firm even as those around him cracked under pressure.

Konkona Sen Sharma | Search: The Naina Murder Case | JioHotstar

Konkona Sen Sharma is the best part of this crime show, basing her character on the original Danish noir thriller, The Killing, but giving it her own touches. She wears her spine straight and her uniform—dress shirt, pants and boots, and a gun she doesn’t like to fire. As ACP Sanyukta Das, she smiles rarely, has a trouble­some teenage daughter, a needy husband, a suspi­cious partner and a nettlesome case. Sen Sharma is aging like fine wine. If only the Hindi film industry could keep up.

Paramvir Singh Cheema | Black Warrant | Netflix

He is the tragic beating heart of Black Warrant, a series replete with such char­acters. As Shivraj Singh Mangat, Paramvir Singh Cheema brings a bruised dignity to the role of a jail official who is considered suspicious after Operation Blue Star and takes to drinking to drown his degradation. His sad smile, his unspoken hurt and his seething rage cuts through the clutter of a busy series that has a lot to say about con­temporary history and human nature, and of course the inner workings of Tihar Jail.

Neeraj Madhav | Love Under Construction | JioHotstar

He came into national spotlight as the enigmatic patient in season one of The Family Man. Since then, Neeraj Madhav has done a series of chameleon-like roles. In this light-hearted Malayalam series, he is a Dubai-based white collar worker and an aspiring home owner in Kerala. Even as he tries to build his dream home, he has to contend with his overbearing parents, his emotionally ambiguous girlfriend and the expectations from an NRI Malayali. As Vinod, Neeraj Madhav is appropriately charming and con­fused, and the series is better for it.