On Shantaram, There’s No Such Thing as a Flawed Hero

Apple TV+ is selling it as a political thriller set in early-’80s Bombay, but the streamer’s new series Shantaram plays like fan fiction for liberal arts professors who believe their classy educations and well-reasoned morals could make them heroes in a crisis. Underneath the fight scenes, tense staredowns, and occasional murders committed by junkie prostitutes, there’s an unwavering faith in guys who have read the right books.

Granted, everyone keeps saying that disgraced Australian student Lin Ford (Charlie Hunnam) is a screw-up. Even Ford himself swears he’s prideful and short-sighted at least once an episode. But if you ignore the dialogue and look at the plot, you see that every major action hinges on his unerring moral compass.

The story begins, for instance, when he breaks out of an Aussie jail and flees to India, and we’re inundated with flashbacks of him being abused by his jailers, who are furious he won’t give up his partner in a bank robbery gone wrong. Right away, Lin’s positioned as an honorable thief. His escape is less about the “lowbrow” desire to get out of prison than his great spiritual need to leave a system that brutally punishes people with principles. We even see a vicious police detective named Wally Nightingale (David Field) mock Lin’s time in college before he orders a beating, just in case it wasn’t clear that the authorities are mindless brutes.

Later, we learn that Lin only got caught because he stayed at the scene of the robbery to give CPR to a guard that got shot. When he learns the guy was Greek, he mournfully guesses what his nickname might have been, explaining to his lawyer that he knows enough about Greek culture to understand their slang conventions. Later, wracked by guilt and presumably drafting his own jailhouse sobriquet, he confesses on the stand and willingly goes to prison.

And sure, Lin has to assault a few inmates on the inside, but that’s just for protection. The same goes in India, where he finds himself embroiled in a plot involving crime lords and government payoffs. Various thugs try to hurt him — and he responds with the skill of a street fighter — but Lin never instigates a thing. On the contrary, he’s trying to help at all times. He only gets pulled into the Bombay plot in the first place because he’s rescuing a sex worker who’s been trapped by her madam, and he gets even more tangled up with the criminals because he’s so desperate to provide black market medical supplies to the residents of a slum where he’s hiding out. Meanwhile, he saves more lives than penicillin. He not only becomes a default doctor to that slum community, but also convinces mobsters to settle their grudges without murder. One of them even has a speech about how Lin’s worldview has changed him.

It’s worth noting that this character is based on the actual life of an Australian criminal named Gregory David Roberts, who also wrote the novel Shantaram in 2003. A plot summary suggests he’s the one who first wrote Lin as a misunderstood saint, which makes sense considering he was turning his own life into an adventure tale. One wonders, though, why series creators Eric Warren Singer and Steve Lightfoot went along with it. There’s obviously a rich and thorny story here, and if it were willing to engage with Lin’s moral culpability or the ways that corruption affects entire countries, then the show might reach the heights of an exceptional political drama like Sundance’s The Honourable Woman. Instead, it keeps straining itself to justify Lin’s behavior.

Stuck with this writing, Hunnam can’t access the brutal charm that made him so exciting to watch on Sons of Anarchy. Instead, he does a lot of earnest staring and righteous shouting. (He smiles maybe four times in the entire 12-episode season.) He also growls out a constant stream of self-serious voiceovers about Lin’s inner life. “A man can live in a city with a broken heart and mangled pride,” we hear him thinking, while he squints into the morning light. “But to survive in a slum, he must unfurl it for all to see.”

The other characters are just as flat. Prabhu (Shubham Saraf ) is the hyperactive Bombay hustler who tries to grift Lin out of money, then becomes his best friend and cultural translator. Khader Khan (Alexander Siddig) is the crime lord with a strict code of business. Karla (Antonia Desplat) is the ruthless woman whose icy heart eventually melts for our hero, even though she’s dating another woman. That leaves the police as the only ones who don’t adore him, and in the cliffhanger that ends the season, there’s a suggestion that even Lin’s adversary Detective Nightingale might be swayed by his unerring decency. Perhaps more notably, there’s also an image in the finale that implies Lin is suffering through one of the stations of the cross. If the series does indeed get renewed, it wouldn’t be that surprising to learn our long-haired hero has been the Messiah all along.

Shantaram premieres October 14 on Apple TV+ with three episodes. New episodes will release weekly through December 16.

Mark Blankenship has been writing about arts and culture for twenty years, with bylines in The New York Times, Variety, Vulture, Fortune, and many others. You can hear him on the pop music podcast Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs.