Yahoo Lifestyle The Return Of ‘Luther’-Like Police Drama ‘Paatal Lok’ Reveals Secrets Of A Little-Known Indian State
Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s strand in which, each fortnight, we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films killing it in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are appearing in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track… So we’re going to do the hard work for you.
This week we head to India, where the return of a much-loved Prime Video drama series after almost five years has been making headlines and attracting subs. Season 2 of Paatal Lok could well be among 2025’s first breakout hits, with views clocking up in its home country and top-10 lists being cracked in others. The Hindi-language police drama follows Jaideep Ahlawat and Ishwak Singh as an unlikely detective duo brought back together for the first time in several years to investigate a political murder in the little-known Indian state of Nagaland.
More from Deadline
Name: Paatal Lok Season 2
Country: India
Network: Prime Video (global)
Producer: Clean Slate Filmz in association with Eunoia Films
For fans of: Delhi Crime, Luther
Distributor: Prime Video
The return of Paatal Lok — literally translated as Neverworld — has been a long time coming. At one point it looked like the season itself might be stuck in a state of perpetual perdition, as the pandemic and production troubles bit, but it launched globally on January 17 and has been flying in Prime Video’s top 10 charts ever since, both in India and countries such as the UK.
After the well received but locally controversial first season dropped in May 2020, writer, creator and showrunner Sudip Sharma didn’t know if he wanted to return to the world he’d created for Delhi police officers Hathi Ram Chaudhary (Jaideep Ahlawat) and Imran Ansari (Ishwak Singh), having neatly closed out their tale of an assassination attempt gone wrong.
“I don’t personally like open ended stories and leaving the viewers struggling for answers,” he says. “The first season was complete in itself, and I would have been happy leaving it there. This was entirely new, almost like writing a new show with similar thematic and borrowing the central character.”
Indeed, it was Ahlawat’s haggard underdog cop Hathi Ram who brought him back in the end. Stuck as a ‘permanent resident’ in Paatal Lok, the character limps around, spending most of his time battered and bruised, and huffing and puffing as he chases criminals. All the while, he stoically keeps to his moral code and professionalism, making his something of a cult hero in India, in the vein of Idris Elba’s brow-beaten detective John Luther. He’s also the reason Sharma said ‘yes’ to Season 2. “There were two people who called me back – Hathi Ram and Jaideep,” says the showrunner.
The desire for something new was a big part of the reason he shifted the action from the Hindi heartland of Delhi to Nagaland, a state in India that is far less known in the world of high-end TV drama. “I knew if I was going to take another couple of years to write a new season, I wanted a fresh setting,” says Sharma, who is one of India’s preeminent showrunners and creators with a track record on the likes of Netflix’s Kohrra, which has a second season currently in production, and Bundeli-language film Sonchiriya.
The result is a storyline that picks up several years after the first ended and begins with the murder of a Nagaland politician while on a business trip in New Delhi. Hathi Ram, investigating the disappearance of a migrant worker, makes a startling discovery that connects the two crimes and brings him back together to his former junior, Imran, a Muslim officer who is now his senior. They travel to Nagaland, a sparsely-populated state known for its tribal politics, where they find their efforts to solve the cases blocked at every avenue, with local cops, criminals and leaders all keen to see them leave. Like the first season, the show is violent and gritty, but always making a point about how what’s shown on screen represents something deeper about the Indian psyche. Little is explained and the answers are revealed through nuanced dialog and intriacate plotting.
Also returning to the cast are Gul Panag as Hathiram’s faithful wife, while new cast includes Tillotama Shome playing an untrusting Nagaland police officer, Nagaland rapper LC Sekhose as the son of the murdered politician, film director Jahnu Barua as a powerful local politician, and Nagesh Kukunoor as a government bureaucrat. Anushka Sharma and Karnesh Sharma’s Clean Slate Filmz is producing in association with Eunoia Films, with Avinash Arun Dhaware the director. Sudip Sharma wrote the scripts with Abhishek Banerjee and Tamal San, with all three represented by U.S.-India talent agency Tulsea.
BJP Ire
Reviews have been almost universally positive, with The Indian Express calling Paatal Lok a “masterclass in long-form storytelling” and a “brave step up” from Season 1, which established Hathi Ram as one of Indian TV’s new heroes, but also upset right-wingers with its sympathetic portrayal of minority groups. In a surreal instance, a member of the ruling BJP party demanded Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli divorce his wife, Anushka Sharma, a producer on the show, in a fit of rage after noticing his picture is visible on the wall in a scene.
Season 2 hasn’t caused similar backlash yet, but for Sharma it was another chance to reveal something new about a little-understood corner of the country. “Through Hathi’s eyes you can explore this new world,” he says. Sharma, who was brought up in the north-east, made sure his representation was as accurate as it could be, working with locals on the writing and filmmaking despite the lack of a functioning production system in Nagaland. Locals were trained in production and anyone who showed an ounce of acting talent was brought in and given a crash course in screen performance, meaning the likes of LC Sekhose and history professors feature. “There is a certain rawness and natural ability from some of these people,” says Sharma. “They don’t have actor reflexes and approached it differently.”
That authentic representation has been praised in a region full of diversity. “I would be very ashamed if I got it wrong,” says Sharma. “What is surprising about the Nagaland culture is it has never really been authentically represented on screen, and part of that is the number of local languages.” As for production, Sharma and his team worked to train up often inexperienced local crew to film often complicated shoots.
Sharma says Prime Video, which is distributing the eight-part series globally, gave him the space he needed to make such decisions. Given that a major criticism of Indian productions during what many call the “golden age of series” before and during the pandemic is a lack of top-end crew, that choice was commendable and highlighted the faith Amazon’s local commissioning team placed in Sharma’s vision. The odds were further stacked against Paatal Lok after the Covid-19 pandemic caused delays, inevitably leading to costs spiralling, but the streamer held firm. “They were solid,” says Sharma.
As our global temperature-take article published earlier today noted, Indian production has slowed significantly after the global streamers refocused towards more U.S.-centric commissioning models. While Prime Video and Netflix have remained big players in India’s originals game, budgets are falling, just as is the case in other parts of the world.
Sharma says the sector “is cooling down, and in some ways, it is mirroring what is happening with the U.S. TV industry around the pandemic.” He adds: “There was a lot of overheating, especially as we did not have the U.S.’s depth of talent. We were used to making Bollywood films and the Bollywood style of storytelling is very different from long-form storytelling. A lot of mediocre stuff got made, and the streamers took notice and realized they needed to correct. You want everyone to be busy, but it didn’t do the industry good in the long run.”
Happily, the bets the streamers are still making are resulting in the likes of Paatal Lok Season 2. Perhaps all the pain has been worth it. Watch the trailer here.
Best of Deadline
How to Watch The 67th Annual Grammy Awards Online And With Cable
2025 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Oscars, Spirits, Grammys, Tonys, Guilds & More
The 2025 Oscars: Everything We Know So Far About The Nominations, Ceremony, Date & Host
Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
