Netflix's Best of the Best turns college Bollywood dance into a comedy runway
Netflix Tudum announces Best of the Best, a dance comedy starring Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia as childhood friends competing on a college Bollywood fusion team, streaming Sept. 18.
Read the original article on Netflix Tudum →
If you went to a North American university with a South Asian student scene, you probably know someone who treated competitive Bollywood dance like a varsity sport with better outfits. Netflix is finally building a movie around that world.
According to Netflix Tudum, Best of the Best is an upcoming dance comedy starring Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (Never Have I Ever, Freakier Friday) and Priyanka Kedia (Everything To Me), with Hasan Minhaj co-writing and producing. The film streams Sept. 18.
The premise
Tudum describes the story as following two childhood best friends, Maya (Ramakrishnan) and Anjali (Kedia), who join their college's competitive Bollywood dance team and discover the road to a national championship is "far more raucous and cutthroat than they ever imagined."
That sentence alone explains why the project matters culturally. Bollywood fusion teams on college campuses are not a novelty backdrop. They are community infrastructure: rehearsal schedules, diaspora friendship networks, inter-school rivalries, and a blend of filmi nostalgia with American campus life. A comedy that takes the competition seriously enough to call it cutthroat is speaking to people who lived it.
Tudum also frames the film as celebrating Bollywood fusion dance, young adulthood growing pains, and friendship's staying power. Those three pillars are basically the genre contract.
Who is making it
The creative team is stacked with people who already know this audience.
Lena Khan directs. Khan directed four episodes of Never Have I Ever, the series that made Ramakrishnan a household name for many diaspora viewers. That connection matters because Never Have I Ever proved there is a global appetite for South Asian American teen and young-adult stories told with specificity rather than garnish.
Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam co-write and produce through 186K Films. Minhaj's comedy career has long treated South Asian American identity as mainstream material, not niche confession. Venkataramanujam co-created Hasan Minhaj Does Not Know and shares the writing credit here.
Jonathan Eirich produces for Rideback, with Ryan Halprin executive producing, per Tudum.
The cast beyond the leads
Tudum lists a deep ensemble mixing familiar diaspora faces and newer names:
Chaneil Kular (Sex Education), Ankur Rathee (Single Papa, Shehzada), Shreya Navile (Month of Madhu), Becky Alex, Nihar Duvvuri (John Proctor Is the Villain), Nico Greetham (The Prom), Amryn Khurana (Legends), Tanishq Joshi, Lilly Singh (Bad Moms), Sasha Bhasin (XO, Kitty, The Pitt), Janina Gavankar (The Morning Show), and Saara Chaudry (The Breadwinner, The Muppets Mayhem).
That roster signals intent. This is not a single-lead vehicle with everyone else as background dancers. Netflix is assembling actors who already mean something to different slices of the diaspora audience, from YA streaming to prestige TV.
Why Never Have I Ever fans should pay attention
Tudum leans into the Ramakrishnan connection hard, surrounding the announcement with related Never Have I Ever guides and videos. That is partly marketing synergy, but it is also an accurate audience map.
Viewers who watched Devi Vishwakumar's chaos for four seasons are the obvious on-ramp for a college-age friendship comedy with competitive stakes and dance set pieces. Netflix is not hiding the pipeline. It is advertising it.
For diaspora readers, the interesting question is whether Best of the Best can translate club culture into cinematic scale without flattening it into a generic underdog sports movie. The Tudum copy suggests it knows the difference, naming Bollywood fusion specifically rather than vague "dance battle" language.
What we still do not know
Tudum's article is an announcement, not a trailer breakdown. Runtime is listed at 1 hour 50 minutes on the site sidebar, but plot specifics beyond the championship frame are thin. We do not yet know how the film handles school rivalry politics, romantic subplots, or the class and regional differences inside South Asian campus communities.
Those details will determine whether the movie feels like an inside portrait or a postcard.
Best of the Best is one of the clearest examples this year of Netflix programming aimed at diaspora joy rather than diaspora trauma alone. Competitive Bollywood dance, female friendship, Minhaj-adjacent comedy writing, and Ramakrishnan's post-Never Have I Ever momentum all point to the same audience: people who want to see their college years reflected with energy and jokes.
Mark Sept. 18 on the culture calendar. Read Netflix Tudum for cast and production credits. Watch for a trailer to see whether the choreography and campus details match the promise of the premise.
