In the OTT space in India, thrillers seem to be popular regardless of the violence, sex and profanity that are the norm. A few of the major shows have been adapted from foreign sources, but the ones that attract the viewers are plots in which family is entangled—Mirzapur, The Family Man, Your Honour, Undekhi, Arya, Candy, Aranyak, to name just a few.
The latest to stream on Zee TV— Bloody Brothers—has been adapted from a BAFTA-winning British series, Guilt, and suitably Indianised. That kinky villain could only have come from old-style Bollywood movies. Shaad Ali, just out of the disaster that was the Indian version of Call My Agent, gets to work with failsafe material—Guilt being acclaimed as the British Fargo.
Ooty stands in for Edinburgh from the original, giving the otherwise dark plot a visual appeal missing from the overall grunge of shows set in the north Indian hinterland. Jagjeet Grover (Jaideep Ahlawat) is a lawyer, caught up in scams, the extent of which he does not even know. He has settled his nerdy younger brother Daljeet (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) to manage a book shop-cum-café, even though there is barely a customer for books in the town.
When driving back from a wedding, Daljeet knocks down an old man, and only a very drunk or very daft person would carry the victim into his house, settle him in a chair and then leave his wallet behind. An exasperated Jaggi “Paaji” helps, because that’s what brothers do. The dead man, Samuel Alvarez (Asrani) had cancer, so nobody found his death suspicious and he was buried without an autopsy.
