They came for the crime but stayed for the characters, is how the cast and crew of Netflix’s hit series Delhi Crime summarize the outsized success of the show’s first season.
Delhi Crime Season 2 follows those same characters – Shefali Shah’s DCP Vartika Chaturvedi, younger cop Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal) and right-hand man Bhupendra Singh (Rajesh Tailang) – as they tackle a series of brutal murders of senior citizens in the middle-class neighbourhoods of South Delhi.
With US-based indie filmmaker Tanuj Chopra (Punching At The Sun, Staycation) on board as showrunner and director, working with a team of Indian writers, the series is loosely based on the Kacha-Baniyan gang murders in North India in the 1990s, but is not an exact replica of a particular crime as with the first series.
Delhi Crime Season 1, written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Richie Mehta, followed the police’s hunt for the culprits of a real-life gang rape and murder in South Delhi in 2012, that shocked India and the world due to its brutality. The heavily-researched series followed the original case closely (the police characters were fictional but inspired by real people) and was praised for its realism and sensitivity, winning a string of awards including an Emmy for best international drama in 2020.
“When Richie handed me his notes, the question was where do I take this material?” says Chopra, adding that Netflix brought him on board because the raw, hand-held, fast-paced nature of his indie films matched the tone of the show.
“My hope was that we’d find a way to grow the show and pull in an audience that didn’t see the first season, perhaps because they couldn’t take the material, or did see it because they were familiar with the crime, and then discovered this beautiful cast of characters. My task was how do I take these amazing characters and pull them forward?”
Shah says she can easily summarize her character’s evolution in the second season: “In DC1, Vartika became a hero, in DC2, she’s human. She makes mistakes, she has flaws, but then she acknowledges and corrects it, even if it’s at the cost of herself. Also, in DC1, there was no wavering of moral compass for her, it was very clear, these are the bad guys, I have to go get them. It’s not as simple as that in DC2. She’s left with a lot of internal questioning.”
The show touches on a range of hot button social issues – inequality and violence in Indian society and attitudes towards India’s tribal communities, who were connected to the Kacha-Baniyan gangs, but for decades have suffered from discrimination and economic disadvantage. In recent years, Indian web series asking uncomfortable questions of society have run into trouble with both censors and local netizens, while recent Bollywood movies are being hit with calls for audience boycotts for being unpatriotic.
But Shah says DC2 stays true to the first season in that it doesn’t deal with social issues in a “commercial” or sensationalist way, which is why there’s so been so much respect for the show: “It’s all very raw and pure and straight from the heart. We can say very proudly that we’ve achieved what we set out to make.” As for India’s current boycott culture: “I just don’t understand where it comes from. I feel any kind of boycott or hatred, it’s just so much effort to really dislike something. I don’t understand the psyche and I’m just hoping its temporary.”
As with the first season, DC2 went heavy on research into the real-life crimes and characters it was depicting or at least amalgamating: “Before we wrote a word of the script, we went through documents and case files and interviewed reporters who covered the crimes when they were happening. We spoke to police, and academics who covered the communities the show is about, and people from the community itself. All those perspectives go in to crafting our narrative.”
Chopra adds that this level of realism is resonating with audiences in India and internationally, and explains the current success of Indian crime series, at a time when Bollywood movies, known for flights of fantasy rather than gritty depictions of real life, are not doing so well.
The show also got some unintended time for reflection when Covid hit India. It started shooting before the pandemic but was disrupted a few times as India endured two waves of the pandemic in mid-2020 and spring 2021. Overseas crew were forced to fly back and forth from North America and, at one point, Chopra and DoP David Bolen were working on the series via satellite. “But what happened during lockdown is that it gave us time to step back and re-evaluate whatever was created,” says Shah. Chopra adds: “We realised there were some elements we didn’t need in the narrative, that we thought we did earlier on, and some pieces that needed to be built out more than we thought.”
Chopra’s debut feature, Punching At The Sun, played at Sundance in 2006, while his credits also include Chee And T (2016) and Staycation (2018), which both won awards at Los Angeles Film Festival. He is currently developing a series based on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Devdas that is set up at Searchlight.
Shah was well known before Delhi Crime for roles in films such as Satya, Monsoon Wedding and Gandhi, My Father, and is now one of the busiest actors in India with recent roles including Netflix movie Darlings, alongside Alia Bhatt. Is she open to working outside of India? “I would work anywhere in the world and learn languages for it,” she replies. “Look at cinema today, it’s so amazing. I’m a student of cinema and an avid watcher, and luckily now it’s not restricted to the colour of your skin.”
Chopra adds: “The world is flat and getting flatter and Netflix is at the centre of this space of creating narratives that are global in nature but true to their nationalities versus it just being a Hollywood-centric industry.”
Delhi Crime S2 is produced by SK Global Entertainment, Golden Karavan and Film Karavan and starts streaming on Netflix on August 26.