Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Shantaram’ On Apple TV+, Where Charlie Hunnam Is A Fugitive Trying To Lay Low In 1980s Bombay

Shantaram was adapted from the book of the same name by Gregory David Roberts, who based the book on his own experiences. Eric Warren Singer and Steve Lightfoot created the series, with Lightfoot becoming the showrunner after Singer left. Like most shows from the last few years, it ran into lots of production delays due to monsoon season in its Bhopal, India shooting location as well as the pandemic. It’s taken three years to get it onto our screens; was it worth the wait?

SHANTARAM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man looks from between some bars as he watches a construction crew exit a door across a prison yard. In a voice over, he talks about how many years it took him to learn about “love, fate and chasing redemption.” It’s a story that spans three continents, and it started with a simple decision: “Escape or die.”

The Gist: Lin Ford (Charlie Hunnam) is in an Australian prison in 1982; he sees himself as a “failed student, failed son, failed criminal and a failed addict.” He was a paramedic attending college when he committed his crime. He has made enemies in prison, which is why he needs to escape; otherwise, he’ll be killed.

He manages to escape, with the help of his cellmate, but it isn’t easy; it involves crawling through vents, stealing a saw, and climbing down a 40-foot wall. He goes to his college professor for help, and the professor, realizing his former student can’t stay in Australia, gives him money and a suggestion of where to go.

Lin lands in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. He meets Prabhu (Shubham Saraf), who is the self-proclaimed “best tour guide in Bombay. The two hit it off immediately — of course, the 100 rupees per day that Lin pays him helps. In the hotel room Prabhu is kept awake by the torture he was subjected to by a police detective who pressed him for the name of the associate who killed one of his police colleagues.

While in a market with Prabhu, Lin meets a beautiful woman named Karla (Antonia Desplat), who invites her to go to an expat bar called Reynaldo’s Cafe. When he gets there, Karla introduces him to her group of friends and associates, and he sees that this is the place where deals go down, though the rule is that they’re not completed inside the bar. Among others, he also gets to know an American named Lisa (Elektra Kilbey), who is essentially a junkie under the thumb of two Indians who serve as her pimps. Nora seems to be there to protect Lisa from her bad instincts, something that impresses Lin.

After Lin runs afoul of a bunch of corrupt cops who want to beat up a “white motherfucker” for breaking curfew, he looks to get out of Bombay. But Nora, who now has Lin’s full attention, recruits him to help her with retrieving Lisa from the clutches of a tough madam at a brothel called The Palace. She wants him to impersonate a U.S. diplomat that was going to help her but left town. He agrees to do it, and then he’ll leave the city. But things go south for him after he finds out what Karla’s ulterior motive was.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Shantaram has a bit of a more-modern Casablanca. Is it as good as that all-time classic? Of course not. But the idea of exploring a city’s expat underbelly is certainly reminiscent.

Our Take: Shantaram starts off very slowly, giving viewers time to get to see Lin becoming accustomed, at least a little bit, to being in Bombay, meeting Karla and her associates, and starting to get sucked into her criminal vortex. When he thinks he’s helping Karla with Lisa in order to rescue her, he tells her he wants to “run towards something, not away from something.” But he slowly realizes that he’s always going to be running away, because his past could catch up with him at any point.

One of the problems with the first episode is that we don’t really know much about Lin’s squandered potential other than what he told the professor, and we don’t know about what went into his decision to go to Bombay. Perhaps we’ll learn that later on, but it’s a jump that’s a bit disconcerting. We want to know just how far Lin fell and what he did to land him in prison to the point where he had to escape in order to survive.

But Hunnam is effective at playing a person who wants to have his freedom and thinks he can find it in Bombay, but gets drawn into its underworld anyway. He looks comfortable but not completely comfortable, because Lin knows at some point he’ll need to run. That feeling of unease never leaves his face through the first episode.

Of course, Desplat plays Karla as someone who can draw a guy like Lin into her web. She’s strong and sexy, warm and cold at the same time. She knows she can draw Lin in, but is also attracted to his determination and strength. She’s the most complex character in the series, and Desplat makes you believe that Karla can be good and not-so-good at the same time without even breaking a sweat.

As we see Lin getting deeper and deeper into Karla’s world, not able to escape, the series should be more engaging than the first episode was. At least we hope that’s the case.

Sex and Skin: None, at least in the first episode. We see Hunnam with his shirt off a bunch.

Parting Shot: After leaving Karla’s flat, ticked off that she used him as she did, he gets mugged, his money and fake passport taken. The card of the diplomat he impersonated is thrown down on top of him as he lays in the street unconscious.

Sleeper Star: Alexander Siddig, who plays Khader Khan, doesn’t show up in episode 1, but of course any Star Trek fan will be happy to see the former Deep Space Nine star on their screens.

Most Pilot-y Line: There’s a running joke about how the name “Lin” is Hindi for “big penis,” but it doesn’t really land no matter how many times they mention it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Shantaram doesn’t really dig too deep into the issues facing India in the 1980s, or how an expat like Hunnam’s character fits in given those issues. It’s a slow-moving thriller that we hope picks up some momentum as the series goes along.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.