There’s a The Wire-esque aspect to how Vartika has to handpick a motley team of officers and investigators who she knows she can trust in order to keep the case out of the morass of Delhi’s bureaucracy. Somehow, and probably for the best, this is where Mehta’s reliance on exposition has a lighter touch. There just isn’t time to make jokes or digressions when it makes more sense to show viewers the convoluted nature of the Delhi justice system. Nothing related to these characters is introduced that doesn’t lend itself to Mehta’s bigger thematic points, and any dialogue that isn’t on topic thuds a bit. And Neeti goes out on a date as prelude to a potential arranged marriage, the kind of thing that introduces the subject of gender roles and relationship power dynamics among young generations in contemporary India. Vartika takes it upon herself to give her daughter reasons to stay, a rosy picture jeopardized by the series’ central crime, which gets immediate media interest and misrepresentation. Vartika, for example, has a teenage daughter who’s eager to flee to Canada, convinced that India is garbage. In the opening two episodes - almost completely about assembling a team and beginning the process of tracking down the crime-scene bus - most of the character beats are among the series’ most heavy-handed moments.
#Delhi crime episode 5 online tv#
'Now Apocalypse': TV Review | Sundance 2019ĭelhi Crime Story is one of those elongated procedurals that Peak TV and streaming have birthed and enabled, in the character-driven vein of The Killing or Seven Seconds, only without their character complexity. It’s a possibility that I was totally on board for, but one that didn’t quite pan out. It concludes by teasing that this was “a crime that took the city to the brink.” The voiceover verges on hard-boiled, much of Vartika’s dialogue is comparably turgid, which had me thinking Delhi Crime Story might be some kind of Indian noir.
#Delhi crime episode 5 online series#
The series opens with a foundation-laying voiceover that paints Delhi as a woefully under-policed city in which half the force is stuck on traffic duty or on VIP protection. Leading the case are Deputy Commissioner of Police Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah), a longtime department veteran who fixates on the gruesome nature of the crime and is determined to oversee the case’s solution herself, and Neeti Khanna (Rasika Dugal), an inexperienced trainee whose potential Vartika is able to spot. Gradually and accompanied by chyrons telling us their rank and years of service, the various law enforcement figures on the case are introduced. She was beaten and gang-raped in ways that are detailed in the dialogue and, thankfully, less so visually.
The series begins with the discovery of a naked man and woman in a ditch. Those conventions pop up over and over again in the initial Delhi Crime Story episodes, and because of Mehta’s focus on cultural context, they all feel reasonably fresh and consistently engaging.ĭelhi Crime Story is based on real events from 2012.
Canadian writer-director Richie Mehta, whose background is in film, certainly knows his procedural conventions. The seven-part drama, which premiered its first two episodes as part of Sundance’s Indie Episodic program, focuses on the type of horrifying sex crime that Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has built nearly 450 episodes around - chew on that figure for a couple of seconds. Put Netflix’s Delhi Crime Story in a category of anti-procedural procedurals. or Chicago or Miami, crimes will be solved, diseases diagnosed, or cases tried in a familiar enough way so that you can also fold laundry, prepare dinner or vacuum the living room. They’re shows meant to be watched in partial distraction and with a sense of relief in knowing that whether the show is set in New York or L.A. Unless you’re an utter genre neophyte, you can tune in to a procedural and know its rhythms and arcs with reasonable certainty. Procedurals, even the most gory and violent, are built with audience comfort in mind.
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