IT'S HAUNTING, RAW AND DEEPLY HUMANE

Whenever I watch shows like Mare of Easttown, where Kate Winslet plays a police detective carved with equal parts brilliance, bruises and moral ambiguity, I find myself asking: Do women in Hindi series ever get roles this solid? Roles that expect them to be flawed, vulnerable and stoic without apology? With Delhi Crime Season 3, the answer — gratifyingly — is yes.

- By Manjusha Radhakrishnan

This season pulls you, almost without resistance, into the world of the Baby Falak case, the horrific crime that rattled India’s capital. Baby Falak — a two-year-old admitted to AIIMS in 2012 with a fractured skull and bite marks — became a symbol of India’s failures in child protection and the grim underbelly of human trafficking.

Delhi Crime uses this tragedy not for sensationalism, but as a lens to examine the systems that fail the most vulnerable.

SHEFALI SHAH: MORAL SPINE

Early on, there’s a scene that sets the emotional tone.

DCP Vartika Chaturvedi (Shefali Shah), surveying a crime that has the force rattled, quietly says: “Let us not criminalise the culprit.” It stops you cold — because the “culprit” is herself a young trafficked girl. In a genre that so often loves its monsters, Delhi Crime insists on empathy instead of easy condemnation.