A welcome antidote to UK crime drama: Netflix’s Kohrra reviewed

It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do cheat occasionally with series like the one featuring the delightfully grumpy, chain-smoking Cormoran Strike, but on the whole I can’t stand the mix of predictability and implausibility: all the goodies will be female and/or ethnic; the murderer will always be white, middle class and male; no one ever gets arrested for misgendering someone on Twitter because in the parallel universe of cop TV the police still actually think it’s their job to solve crimes.

So, your options are either to watch classic episodes of The Sweeney or to find a cop series from one of those countries where the old values still prevail. India, for example. Here – well, certainly in the Punjab, setting for Netflix’s Kohrra – you won’t find a rainbow-painted patrol car anywhere in sight. Instead, they trundle around in manly khaki-coloured Jeeps, dress in smart khaki uniforms, help themselves to bottles of whisky from behind the bar of dodgy clubs they’re investigating and encourage witnesses to be more helpful during interrogation by squeezing them hard on the testicles. This is pre-Macpherson report policing at its most vauntingly unreconstructed.

This is pre-Macpherson report policing at its most vauntingly unreconstructed

Sometimes, you wonder if our heroes Balbir (Suvinder Vicky) and Garundi (Barun Sobti) push things a bit too far in their zeal to see justice done. The series opens with the discovery of a body in some fields. So what’s the first thing they do? Beat up the hapless fellow who accidentally found the body (while seeking a quiet place to shag his girlfriend). And then, when that doesn’t work, they round up all the known drug addicts in the area, drag them to the police station, get them to strip to their underwear and thrash them with sticks, just on the off chance that it was one of them that dunnit.