When I’m in New York or Berlin, I’m out just about every night, soaking up the music, dance, theater, and miscellaneous events that are available in those cities.\u00a0I hardly ever watch TV during those seasons. But the whole time I’m there, I’m also\u00a0keeping a list of the television programs people recommend to me\u2014mainly cop shows from various countries around\u00a0the world\u2014that I can watch to my heart’s content\u00a0when I return to Berkeley.<\/p>\n
So far this summer I’ve managed to see\u00a0all five seasons of Line of Duty<\/em>, an excellent British show that is wildly popular on its own turf. Each season features a new crime\u2014generally several intertwined crimes\u2014to be resolved by the stalwart\u00a0investigators in AC-12 (that is, anti-corruption unit twelve, which is assigned to root out crimes committed by other cops). But in addition to each season’s gripping plots, there is an over-arching plot involving an unnamed but very high-up corrupt police administrator whose name may or may not begin with H. As a procedural, this one feels real enough to be persuasive; and as a demonstration of good, low-key British acting, it can’t be beat. One of the most interesting aspects of the show is the fact that it takes place in an unnamed city (it was filmed mainly but not entirely in Belfast), and all the characters have different regional accents\u2014as if to suggest that Scotland, the Midlands, Northern Ireland, and southeast London have all come together in a single place. You have to stay on your toes to keep up with the action, but it all pays off in the end.<\/p>\n The other series\u00a0I’ve watched in full, so far, is the first and perhaps the only season of something called Delhi Crime<\/em>. This remarkable concoction is so realistic-feeling that it seems almost like a documentary,\u00a0though its attitude toward character\u2014not to mention\u00a0its plenitude of characters\u2014reminds me of some of the best works of Indian fiction, like Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance<\/em> or Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh<\/em>. It is also, in its own way, a Delhi version of\u00a0The Wire<\/em>\u2014and like The Wire<\/em>, it\u00a0appears to have sprung from the imagination of\u00a0a single person. The David Simon figure is in this case named Richie Mehta, and you can find his name all over the credits, from the “created by” and\u00a0“written and directed by”\u00a0at the front to the tiny end-notes\u00a0about assistant directors and subtitle writers.<\/p>\n So many things are gripping about this series that I hesitate to limit its appeal by naming them. The cops are all characters:\u00a0some good, some bad, some middling, and all struggling against circumstances that would make anyone else give up on the job. The one-and-only\u00a0crime at the heart of the show is based on a real one\u2014the horrific gang-rape of a young woman on a bus\u2014and we watch as, day after day, the cops make Herculean efforts to catch the six offenders. The female\u00a0DSO who heads up the investigation is staunchness personified (she basically doesn’t go home between the rape and the final arrest, five days later), but some of her helpers are no less admirable in their stolid pursuit of reasonable justice. And to watch the “procedures” in this police procedural is fascinating for a Westerner raised on Anglo-American cop shows. When the Delhi cops arrest someone, for instance, they don’t put him in handcuffs; instead, one of the police officers holds the perp firmly by the hand. To evade protestors at the front door of the police station, they might all \u2014including superior officers and criminals alike\u2014have to clamber over fences and through discarded trash to go in the back way. And when the\u00a0police\u00a0address civilians, their tone can\u00a0range from deeply respectful tenderness (toward the victim’s parents, in particular, who are addressed as “Auntie” and “Uncle” by the cops watching over the injured girl) to\u00a0a strange form of\u00a0antagonistic intimacy,\u00a0as when they tell a fleeing perp that if he doesn’t come back, they will reveal his crimes to his family. There is something both wonderful and self-consciously\u00a0appalling\u00a0about the India this program portrays, and to me it feels very true to the stupendous, hair-raising, entrancing country that gave rise to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I’m in New York or Berlin, I’m out just about every night, soaking up the music, dance, theater, and miscellaneous events that are available in those cities.\u00a0I hardly ever watch TV during those seasons. But the whole time I’m … Continue reading