The strongest argument to watch the new web series Brown is to catch Karisma Kapoor’s return. But, this show carries a weight of expectation that it only partially earns. Directed by Abhinay Deo the man behind Delhi Belly and Blackmail, adapted from Abheek Barua’s novel City of Death, the show allows Karisma to plant herself in one of crime fiction’s most well-trodden formulas. The flawed, alcoholic detective cracking cases of gruesome murders while wrestling with her own psychological wreckage. That the show is set against the dark, rain-soaked streets of Kolkata creates a unique setting. But all that potential doesn’t actually come to fruition in Brown, instead it comes to a level of frustration.
Kapoor plays Rita Brown, a suspended DCP whose life before the case opens is essentially controlled demolition. She drinks alone, she keeps the world at arm’s length, and she carries the wreckage of unnamed personal tragedies with a heaviness the show initially handles with admirable restraint. When she is pulled back into service to investigate the brutal murder of a young woman from a powerful elite family, the show gets its engine running. What Rita discovers as she peels back the city’s respectable surface is a network of conspiracy and corruption that runs deeper than any single crime. Surya Sharma’s young police officer accompanies her through this, part partner, part conscience and the pairing gives the show its most respectable dynamic, two people bound together by damage rather than conventional chemistry.
The creative structure that Deo and his writers Diggi Sisodia, Sunayana Kumari and Mayukh Ghosh build around this premise is atmospheric and, at intervals, genuinely interesting. The Jaiswal family at the heart of the murder sits at the intersection of old Kolkata money and new moral rot. The show is at its most interesting when it allows the city’s class architecture to do quiet, uncomfortable work. But the storytelling repeatedly chooses to serve mood over actual drama. Episodes accumulate texture without always accumulating tension, and the mystery at the centre, which should tighten with every revelation, just drifts along. Characters that deserved the full glare of the narrative are introduced and then left in shadow. The climactic unravelling, when it arrives, lands without the force its setup promised.
The strongest thing about Brown without contest though, is Karisma Kapoor. This is a performance sans any of that ’90s movie-star hangover. Rita Brown is unglamorous, emotionally exposed and Karisma delivers with conviction. The performance draws a new line of expectation for what actresses of her generation can still do. She inhabits Rita’s ruin with detail. The morning cigarettes, the eyes that process everything a beat after everyone else has moved on, the way she holds a glass like it’s the only honest relationship she has left. It’s the kind of work that makes you wish the show surrounding it were sharper. Surya Sharma, already having quite a year between this and Undekhi, brings his customary restraint to a role that could easily have been functional. Soni Razdan and Helen bring warmth to the fringes, and Jisshu Sengupta navigates the morally ambiguous territory of his character with ease.
Technically, Brown is one of the better-looking Indian streaming productions of the year. Cinematographer Amogh Deshpande’s Kolkata is beautifully, purposefully bleak with narrow lanes glazed in rain, crumbling colonial façades, interiors that seem to absorb light rather than reflect. The colour palette tracks Rita’s interior state throughout, and the show’s visual identity is distinctive enough to carry scenes that the writing cannot. The sound design and background score are similarly assured, wrapping the city in a suffocating, low-frequency dread.
Brown is ultimately a show where the craft is doing considerably more work than the story warrants. Karisma Kapoor’s performance is reason enough to seek it out and reason enough to hope the show earns a second season that trusts its own darker instincts a little more.
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