Delhi Crime season 3 review: Another casualty at the altar of franchise filmmaking

The third season of Netflix India’s banner show Delhi Crime is a cautionary tale that reinforces a reality impossible to ignore anymore—not every successful series needs to be stretched into a franchise.

After the stupendous, industry-shifting impact of the first season, which premiered in 2019, when the streaming giant announced that it would return with a

second in 2022, I was apprehensive because it’s rare that a sophomore instalment is able to recreate the magic of the debut. However, despite a change of directors (from Richie Mehta to Tanuj Chopra), Delhi Crime managed to achieve the unthinkable. The second season turned out to be as blistering, meditative, clutter-breaking and immersive as the first.

So it was not unreasonable to expect the third to use the exploding genre of Delhi to dig into the region’s frustrating complexity and conduct a nuanced probe yet again to reveal the contorted psyche of the names that make national headlines with ‘Madam Sir’ and her posse of loyalists at the centre of the mayhem. But the third season does not hold a candle to the first two. The spell has broken.

This season is so middling it’s as if the makers listed the worst fears of the show’s devotees and stitched together six episodes (all under an hour) specifically around them, careful not to miss out any. The writing is generic, the investigation bland, and the execution stilted, half-arsed. Template filmmaking is a curse that can yield rich returns only when supported by a thriving, throbbing story that is alive to the world it occupies.

But despite six writers on board, including director Tanuj Chopra and yet another ghastly crime that shook the nation out of its stupor, the new season fails to create any sense of emotional urgency or social horror—traits that were the hallmarks of the instalments preceding it.

Season 3 opens with Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah), now the Deputy Inspector General of Police, accidentally discovering a truck trafficking girls from Assam to Delhi. Tucked away in Silchar on a punishment posting, this lead gives her an undeniable reason to return to her home turf, NCR, as fractured and in need of repair as ever. On reaching, she finds out Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal), now an Assistant Commissioner of Police, and the rest of her former team working on a case of a two-year-old girl heinously attacked and admitted to the AIIMS trauma centre. The two cases seem to be linked through a common thread—a dubious man named Rahul (Anushmaan Pushkar).

The first three episodes build him—he is the team’s entry ticket into the muck—only to forget him entirely. It’s not just him, this season is uninterested in giving any characters (regulars or new entrants) the room to flourish. Except for Neeti, all the other members of Vartika’s team, in whom the audience is deeply invested in are treated as one-dimensional video-game ploys. The writing is so scattershot and amnesiac that it treats Sudhir (Gopal Datt), a key member of the force, as no more than a filler.

The attention deficit prevails on the criminal side of the show, too. Barring Badi Didi/Meena (Huma Qureshi)—the nefarious antagonist—the show is stubbornly uninterested in exploring anyone or anything beyond the surface. The potential of malleable actors such as Mita Vashisht and Sayani Gupta is only teased, never fully mined.

In trying to crack the two cases, the script is spread too thin. With Delhi as the focal point, the story tries (and fails) to keep pace with the cops who jostle across the country—Assam, Haryana, Gujarat, Mumbai, Rajasthan—to piece together seemingly disjointed links. It’s a busy narrative, too much is happening at all times and yet, little sticks.

Delhi Crime Season 3 exists primarily to remind us that bigger isn’t always better. By constantly jumping from geographical locations, the new instalment ends up belonging nowhere. The earlier seasons used hideous, high-profile crimes to unpack the twisted soul of a city and its people, the myriad differences that divide them and the barbarity that results from these fissures. The new season is too plot-driven to dive into anything of import. There is nothing Delhi about season 3. It could have been any other series set anywhere else in India.

Even the cinematography, which deliciously built tension and an unmistakable sense of immediacy in the first two seasons, is limited to close-ups so tight in this season, it feels jarring, claustrophobic and instantly pulls you out of the moment. Bereft of writing that challenges and takes you places you haven’t been before (both emotionally and experientially), even formidable actors such as Shefali Shah and Huma Qureshi can do so much.

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