While Season 2 of the highly acclaimed Delhi Crime franchise on Netflix awaits telecast, the globally lauded show has already gone into Season 3. Sudhanshu Saria the writer-director of the acclaimed film LOEV has been brought in as one of the writers for Season 3 of Delhi Crime.
An actor from the series told me, “We’ve shot and completed Season 2 of Delhi Crime. Season 3 is now being written. It will go into production in couple of months.”
The hardhitting outstanding first season of Delhi Crime dealt with the brutal gangrape and murder of Nirbhaya. The second and third season Of Delhi Crime are also based on real-life crimes, though they may not be sourced out of Delhi.
Is the second season of Delhi Crime being held back by Netflix to clean out the more controversial visuals and dialogues? “Not at all,” a Delhi Crime actor tells me. “The new government guidelines on what we can’t show is not applicable to our show. We are not going into religion and politics .Crime is fine. It is serials like The Family Man and Patal Lok which have reason to be worried. I believe the second season of both the series has been dropped.”
Here's what I had thought of the first season of Delhi Crime I had written, "Recreating in vivid vicious colours the events before during and after the life-changing ‘Nirbhaya’ gangrape in Delhi, this 7-part series spares us the brutality of watching the rape but protects from none of the trauma and horrific aftermath of a crime that shook the conscience of the nation.
As we hear our drama’s hero Vartika Chaturvedi say, this crime was different, the savagery was unprecedented. She got it right.
I will never forget the sequence where the ravaged girl is rolled into the hospital bloodied brutalized beyond all human explanation, in pain beyond all endurance she tells her father, “I will be fine.”
We do that all the time. We keep saying things will be fine when we know they will only get worse.
Director Richie Mehta negotiates with powerful hands the many hurdles that a crime investigation so complex must face. This is a very professionally handled crime drama, superior to some of the real-life crime dramas on television ( some of which are not bad at all) mainly for the level of performance director Mehta gets out of the cast specially Shefali Shah. But it doesn’t achieve that level of emotional impact that I expected from the product considering the fine talent that’s gone into it.
There are two reasons why Delhi Crime stops short of being a masterpiece on real-life crime. For one it holds back way too much of the angst probably to appeal to a global audience. The attempt to subdue the sheer insanity of the crime is admirable but eventually a fatal error of judgment.
A more immediate crisis of efficacy emerges from the fact that Delhi Crime resembles a very recent Netflix film Soni which was in every way a superior work. The domestic disarray in the life of the female cops and the professional dynamics between two female officers in Soni is echoed here in the rapport that grows between the two cops played by Shefali Shah and Rasika Dugal, both in fine form imbuing the contours of crime with an implosive reined-in anger at a system that fosters inequality and brutality.
Shefali Shah is specially powerful. She is compelling because her anger internalized, palpable. She not only anchors the series with her persuasive presence, she also diminishes and decimates the rather disturbing feeling we get that this sort of stark recreation of India’s most well-known sex crime serves no purpose except to remind us that the change we hoped to see in the number of rapes in our country never happened."
Image source: Imbd