Akhil Arora

With Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar—the new eight-episode miniseries about the life of courtesans, set in the eponymous district of pre-independence Lahore—Sanjay Leela Bhansali has been handed the biggest budget Netflix has ever greenlit for an Indian series. By industry estimates, at over ₹200 crore (about $24 million), it’s more than double what it spent on the highly-awaited second season of Sacred Games, Netflix’s first-ever Indian original. That’s huge. More so as budgets have dried up across the country, with the streaming wars—and as a result, the Golden Age of TV—waning.

Deep into its six-episode run, The Veil—the new Elisabeth Moss-led spy thriller miniseries from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight—showcases the best version of itself. The Veil hits at the double standards of the West through a conversation between a British intelligence operative (Moss) and a suspected ISIS commander (Yumna Marwan, from Little Birds). The former accuses the latter of being a terrorist, as she’s been covertly planning to blow up thousands of people, and that she’s choosing to do it willingly, not being coerced into it as she might have her believe. In response, Marwan’s character rightly points out how the West does the same—and continues to do so—in the East, occupying, razing, killing, and destroying. But that it’s only a tragedy when it happens on their land.

The director of Challengers, the 52-year-old Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, is an ardent student of desire. In all its forms. Guadagnino spent much of his thirties and the first half of his forties with his spiritually connected, self-described Desire trilogy of films—ending with the tender, wondrous and deeply-felt Timothée Chalamet-led Call Me by Your Name. He expanded on the coming-of-age theme with his sensitive and sensual eight-part HBO miniseries We Are Who We Are. It can get weird, too, as it did with the cannibalistic teenagers—Chalamet among them—in the love-amidst-the-horror of Bones and All. But never has Guadagnino’s work been so propulsive, so enticing, and so engrossing before. That is what he accomplishes on Challengers.

Rebel Moon was just the worst. Zack Snyder—the director, co-writer, and (strangely) also the cinematographer—spewed lore as if he was penning a Wikipedia article, not a movie. It was apparent that he had no idea what it took to flesh out characters and develop their interpersonal dynamics. Snyder displayed an utter inability with the camera, too. Rebel Moon looked like it had been shot on a giant parking lot with its endless horizons and poorly applied VFX. All this despite having the easiest of templates: a movie about gathering a team of galactic warriors. So, unless Snyder decided to scrap and reshoot the whole thing in four months—a trailer for Part Two: The Scargiver was appended to the end of Part One: A Child of Fire, after all —the sequel was never going to be a big improvement over the first one.

For about a decade and a half, Todd Howard—who has led direction on every major Bethesda video game since 2008, including the award-winning action role-playing titles Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim—resisted the idea of a Fallout television adaptation. Howard rejected multiple pitches as none of them were “quite clicking” for him. But that changed when Jonathan Nolan—creator of the sci-fi series Westworld, co-writer of The Dark Knight, and a self-professed fan of the Fallout games—rang him up. Howard was impressed: “It was very clear that he had played the games and loved them and had a vision for what it could be on the screen.” The deal was announced in 2020, and a little less than four years later, Fallout the TV show has arrived on Amazon Prime Video.

What is decency? And who gets to define it? In a country where taking offence and sentiments being hurt has morphed into a crutch and a pastime, the boundaries of what’s appropriate shrink every day. But this isn’t anything new. Intolerance has always been widespread—it’s now just easily disseminated. In the eighties, that’s how singer-songwriter Amar Singh Chamkila earned the moniker Elvis of Punjab. (A line in the movie takes it too far and calls him “the Elvis of Punjab, US, UK, and Canada”, which is funny on another level because, you know, Elvis is American.) It was given for his popularity, for shattering multiple sales records over his short life, but it applied to how society was enraged by the content of his lyrics. A sentiment that likely led to his assassination at the ripe age of 27.