‘Kohrra’ season 2 is too dull and too familiar

A few months ago, I started a podcast called Play it Again. One of the first things I learned in the process of creating these was that most of us sound unbearably dull in real-time, while we hem and haw our way towards articulating a thought of varying significance, and that podcasts (even ones featuring your own voice) are best heard at 1.25x or even 1.5x. As speakers thinking about a question or debating a point, it takes most of us a while to “get to the point” and that thought shouldn’t be foremost on the listener’s mind.

The new season of well-loved Netflix series Kohrra needs that bump, because it takes slow-burn storytelling so literally that it takes four out of six episodes to even start coming to the boil. The first season of the show, created by Sudip Sharma and directed by Randeep Jha, was compelling from the get-go—largely because of the old policeman played by a sublime Suvinder Vicky—and offered us something unfamiliar. Its slowness felt earned; we couldn’t look away. Sure, that solid first season borrowed ideas and themes from Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder, but as a grounded Punjabi-language series, it felt real, immediate and plausible.

This new season, coming to us after the superlative second season of Paatal Lok (Amazon Prime, also created by Sharma) feels both perfunctory and dissatisfyingly familiar, giving us more of the same in every way—while less of what made the original shine. The template for the procedural followed streaming platforms has been perfected by Sharma, along with Raj and DK (The Family Man, Amazon Prime) and it takes something special to make it feel fresh again.

Here is the current formula: We will open with a corpse, bloodied and ostensibly “shocking,” even though it is now a mandate for the streaming platforms that the first killing must be shown within the first five minutes. We will then meet the investigators, and as they go about their work, we will learn their inner conflicts as they grimly chase down their prey, with findings from other cases turning out not to be as unrelated after all. Then, a bittersweet ending. Closure, but only just.

As a viewer, this narrative doesn’t thrill me, which is why it’s particularly exciting when people like Sharma rise above it: Paatal Lok became an intense and fascinating character study with Jaideep Ahlawat creating the unforgettably worn-out character of Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary, just as Suvinder Vicky did with Sub-Inspector Balbir Singh. This isn’t to say that Barun Sobti wasn’t fine alongside Vicky as Assistant Sub-Inspector Amarpal Garundi (he really was) but we stuck around because of Balbir. He drove the narrative.

With Balbir gone, Kohrra feels depressingly dull. Sobti’s Garundi has a better role and performs it well, while the main lead is given to the ever-excellent Mona Singh who plays Dhanwant Kaur, the new Sub-Inspector. These are fine actors in a smart series, yet—because the directorial tautness is missing—the first three episodes are so dull and repetitive that even the characters stumble around looking bored. There is nothing to compel the viewer—not a clue, not a character, not a subplot—that feels genuinely unusual, and we’re left watching this season only because we had liked the first one.

Here’s what happens: the bloodied body of a girl is found inside a stable in the Punjab town of Dalerpura. The crime scene is compromised from the start, with cattle defecating over clues, and a young policeman says he has seen the dead girl before. “On your first murder case, every corpse looks like someone you know,” he is told, but then we realise that the dead girl Preet was a content-creator making dance-reels on Instagram. Our two investigators, Dhanwant the stoic and Garundi the hopeful, respectively troubled by their past and their future, set about pulling at any thread in sight.

Sharma’s writing contains nuances and lovely lines (“towels don’t have pockets,” a busy Garundi exclaims at an autowallah clamouring for his fare), and strictly as a police procedural, Kohrra tells a good murky story—though it should have been a two-hour movie and not a six-episode series. There is too much chewing of the cud going on here, narratively speaking, with many a moment repeated for emphasis: We get to see, for instance, many many scenes of Dhanwant being informed by a clinic that her morose husband hasn’t turned up with a sperm sample. Again.

Singh has always been a compelling performer, with significant presence. In an early scene, she dismisses a potential witness from her sight immediately and unmistakably, just by the way she picks up her glass of chai. If she can do so much with so little, it may be a disservice to give her so much. This season of Kohrra skips the philosophising that made the first season so fulfilling—the closest to True Detective we could get—and now we’re left with a facsimile of a facsimile: A memory of Memories of Murder. That’s the problem with the genre, you see. Every procedural looks like one we’ve seen before. This isn’t our first case.

Streaming Tip Of The Week:

Like Kohrra, True Detective (JioHotstar) started off tremendously but then lost its way. The fourth season, ‘Night Country’, is, however, a fabulous and eerie return to form. With the seasons unconnected, you can go straight from the great first one to the superb fourth one, featuring the great Jodie Foster.

Raja Sen (@rajasen) is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series.