Like Khakee: The Bihar Chapter (2022), creator Neeraj Pandey’s standalone sequel Khakee: The Bengal Chapter represents the awkward second rung of crime thriller television — too trashy to be taken seriously, too serious to be pulpy, too long to be bingeable, and too predictable to be culturally specific. It’s more or less an old-school Prakash Jha potboiler stretched into long-form entertainment. A loaded ensemble and the illusion of a grassroots narrative are supposed to offset the generic tone, a cyclical plot and a repetitive landscape. This time, the focus is Kolkata in the early 2000s, where a no-nonsense IPS officer arrives to clean up a city ripe with bloody gang wars, sinister politicians and confused cops. A reporter exclaims: “Is the City of Joy now the City of Bhoy (fear)?”. Thankfully, the show explicitly mentions the timeframe at some point, because this is the one city that makes it hard to distinguish a period setting from a modern one. Timelessness is an aesthetic here; I assumed it was 2025 until I spotted a character holding a Nokia 6600 (which still made it look like 2022). Unfortunately, rumours of a Sourav Ganguly cameo in this seven-episode drama remain rumours, despite there being plenty of scope for a princely outsider with shirt-twirling charisma leading a team of gritty underdogs.

Calcutta is a living, breathing entity in Khakee: The Bengal Chapter, but not in the way we have come to know of it on screen. The city — familiar to the world as the hub of culture and creativity, as the land of Tagore and Ray — is imbued with a sinister edge in this new Netflix series, functioning as a hotbed of gang wars, organ trafficking, kidnapping, murder and of the consistently tenuous equation between cops and criminals. So, a machher bajar, where the act of buying fish has almost been romanticised into a form of art by the Bengali gastronome (honestly, is there any other kind?) sees a policeman being hacked in broad daylight by a bnoti; At the parar cha-er dokan, adda is definitely a mainstay but so is the brokering of hit jobs. A significant character’s body is stacked against the gate of the Victoria Memorial, forming a dichotomous (I refrain from saying ‘striking’) bloody red foreground against the pristine white facade of the city’s iconic landmark. Guns are traded at New Market. The streets are seedy, the changing positions of the players often finds the underbelly indistinguishable from the rest of the city. Calcutta carries the burden of many bodies, its streets tinged with blood.