Watching Apple TV+’s Shantaram is like being on a bad airplane ride. The excitement of creating new memories in a foreign land fuels anticipation which is furthered by a rocky but promising take off. Seat belts come off and the food is served. But then turbulence hits as the stench of rubbery meat fills the air. It’s nauseating, painful, and seems to never end. The ride begins to drag on and the flight attendants do very little to ease the boredom. When the trip finally ends, the relief is unmatched — never again.
If the sheer size of the almost 1000 page best-selling novel by Gregory David Roberts wasn’t reason enough to not pick up the crime novel Shantaram, the TV series adaptation does little to counter this judgment. After great success with tightly written shows like Bad Sisters and Severance, Apple TV+ reminds audiences that bad writing and acting, does in fact, still exist.
The white savior of the show, Dale Conti/Lindsay, played by Charlie Hunnam begins his journey to redemption by causally escaping the Pentridge Prison in Australia — a striking moment because it's one of the only scenes where Hunnam has his shirt on. With a wanted sign now plastered on his forehead, Lindsay moves to Bombay, India, a city so poor and backward that it demands its natural vibrancy be dimmed by a dirty yellow tint. With the help of his cartoon-character sidekick Prabhu (Shubham Saraf), Lindsay builds a home in Bombay, a city that is highly emancipative for him — a fact he reminds audiences time and time again, against their will.
Yet, how Bombay is freeing and from what exactly remains a mystery that the show tries to unsuccessfully reveal in jumbled and repetitive flashbacks. Lindsay, with an unknown past and a murky future finds himself acquainted with the international underworld of Bombay, also known as the other hundred characters introduced who have the personality and depth of a doorknob. After his initial reluctance to shake hands with powerful and intimidating queen of the gangs, Karla (Antonia Desplat), Lindsay decides to help her with a dealing because he needs to be “running towards something, not away from it”. However, all he does post this moment is run away.
With five episodes out to stream, it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that the bad writing that launched the first episode doesn’t seem to be a fluke. Shantaram is the perfect example of a show that has so much going on that it ends up achieving nothing — no character development and a completely absent purpose. The writing holds the characters back from flowering into remotely entertaining beings. The only thing you really learn about the main character Lindsay is that he has an Australian accent (a terrible one) and can mimic an acceptable American one. A poorly executed voice-over by Lindsay exists to divulge the same information over and over again — he loves Bombay, he wants a new start, oh and did he mention he loves Bombay? The voice-over comes off as a lazy way to incorporate key aspects of the book that might be difficult to translate on-screen. But if the voice-over is used to create space for better dialogues then why are they God awful? In a rushed and pointless flashback, Lindsay is asked “Gonna go find yourself, Dale?” to which Hunnam flashes an empty smirk and says, “No. I’m gonna lose myself.”
If the “flushing” out of the main character is this poor, it’s not hard to imagine how devoid of life the side characters are. They are all caricatures of worn out stereotypes. The chatty and somewhat aloof best-friend, the independent woman who is so closed off she cannot receive or give love, and the ditzy blonde who depends on everyone around her. The list is never ending. But nowhere in this list of characters is anyone unique or fresh. Well it doesn’t matter anyway because the actors bend over backwards to make their performances as bland as possible. The chemistry that should be the selling point of the show — the friendship between Lindsay and Prabhu — lacks believability and charisma. To add to that, the massive number of players contributes to a detached style of viewing that doesn’t fare well in the current market of character driven TV. It’s hard to understand how this show can bounce back and bridge the gap in its poor writing by the end of the season.
For a show that attempts to tackle large themes like “redemption” and “finding yourself” it’s still lost in the cacophony of style over substance, which it also does not achieve in any defining sense. The plot never takes shape, the characters never get interesting, and the show just doesn’t seem to know what to do with itself. Apart from the occasional pleasing visual and the momentarily enthralling action sequences, Shantaram is a hard pass, unless you want to learn how to not make a book to series adaptation.
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