Banking, finance, cyberworld: Modern problems replacing Poirot in crime shows

Two friends meeting after a long time agreed where their lunch should be — a thali restaurant. A full hot meal at just Rs 300-plus was a far superior option to bilge served by fast food chains or cafes. Also, thalis do not serve fries – a monotonous, dry, nutritionally deficient throat irritant. (Spare us the ‘handcut’ con. Chopping potatoes unevenly and frying them in something expensive does not change the inherent limitations of fries.)

As the car set out for Nariman Point to a reputed lunch place, the friends talked about the content they were watching online. Both devoured crime shows. Other genres did not appeal to them anymore. Comedy had its days but that’s all. At a simplistic level, crime is simply more gripping than other categories.

And it allows us to vicariously do things we are intrigued by but don’t necessarily want to do – like drugs, guns or fleeing town and starting a new life. In the movie 'Heat', Robert de Niro, playing a crook, tells Al Pacino, a cop, that one rule of “the life” was that you should not have any attachment from which you could not walk away in 30 seconds. Real people have deep attachments, and are thankful for them.


An interesting thing to examine is how international crime shows have changed for Indian viewers, and how crime itself, something far removed from our lives in the old days, is no longer that. It is everyone’s daily reality. The computer that this is being typed on may be a target of shady activity. Our bank accounts are being monitored. Someone somewhere is targeting something connected to us all the time.

For those who grew up in the Doordarshan era, two prominent detective shows were 'The Old Fox', a German program, and Agatha Christie’s 'Hercule Poirot'. The investigator in 'The Old Fox', Erwin Koster, was an unremarkable squat man in a trench coat who quietly went about his work. Poirot was his antithesis — a campish bon vivant in tailored suits and cravats. Both men, though, solved largely murder and theft cases.

Today, crime has spread beyond the retro variety. It is sinister and covert. Criminals do not just want your wallet these days. They want to mess you up. And the shows reflect this. Popular sub-genres have emerged. Drug cartels is one, although drugs isn’t a modern crisis. A few months ago, Mumbai Police released an image of a screen Escobar with the word ‘Nacco’ (‘no’ in Marathi) in its ‘say no to drugs’ campaign. ‘Nacco’, of course, was a play on Narcos.

Banking and finance and the cyberworld are other sub-genres of crime that have hooked viewers. That is the fallout of the contemporary world. Everything is falling apart. But hey, it makes for a good show.