‘Search: The Naina Murder Case’ Series Review: A Crime Drama That Fails Konkona Sen Sharma

In the opening episode of the Search: The Naina Murder Case, its protagonist, ACP Sanyukta Das (Konkona Sen Sharma), engages in banter with the cocky man replacing her, ACP Jai Kanwal (Surya Sharma). Star detective Sanyukta is transferring herself to the cyber crime unit in a new city to save her marriage. Jai taunts her for this decision. To get the better of him, Sanyukta casually spoils the twist of a popular crime drama he’s watching. “Silent Justice” is the name of this show, a nod to Criminal Justice, one of the biggest hits of the same streaming platform and production company. The self-referencing is ironic, because Search is another page out of this OTT playbook: SEO-coded title, by-the-books remake of multi-season European/British series, less-than-ambitious staging, formulaic twists, middling craft, functional conflicts, curated colour.

Search is what I like to call a business-model show, where broad strokes become the only language; where a complex character is reduced to an accessible one who says a line like “I’m lucky that my husband is giving me a second chance” to her boss so that the viewers are well-informed clients; where colleagues stage a fake hostage situation to surprise her with a goodbye cake (she is worryingly fine with the gag); where a powerful man is introduced drunk-sad in bed watching his wedding video so that we know he has a dead wife; where Gen-Z students use words like “bounced,” “shizz,” “stoked” and “simp” during an interrogation because it’s how adults think teenagers speak; where two cops pull an all-nighter and we suddenly hear birds chirping (indoors) because it’s morning; where a political rival only speaks in dog, forest-fire and airplane analogies; where a teenager with body positivity issues explicitly mentions she has body positivity issues (three times over); and where the camera stays a few seconds longer on faces to manufacture a sense of suspense.

Based on the Danish police procedural Forbrydelsen (The Killing), Search revolves around the murder of a college student named Naina; it opens with the frantic girl being chased in the dark with a loud background score, as most shows do when they try to be mysterious about a crime but blatant about the danger. It’s ACP Sanyukta’s last day before she flies to Ahmedabad with her daughter to join her husband and his new job. Her boss puts her on the Naina murder case, of course, because replacement Jai is too green for his liking. Various suspects emerge with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. There’s Tushar (a scowling Shiv Panditt), the charismatic young leader of a political party called Nayi Soch, who’s on the brink of launching a women-empowerment app. There’s his campaign manager Sahil (Dhruv Sehgal), and the friction Sahil shares with Tushar’s right-hand woman and secret girlfriend Raksha (Shraddha Das); Sahil and Raksha are like jealous

siblings vying for their parent’s attention, reflecting the tension between case officers Sanyukta and Jai. There’s Naina’s rich ex-boyfriend and guilty-looking friend; there’s the fact that the body was found in one of Tushar’s campaign cars and the public backlash he faces; there’s Naina’s nice-guy professor Randhir (an inert Varun Thakur) who’s connected to Tushar; there’s also a driver, a murky employee and a doctored sex tape.

The structure is familiar. The Naina night appears in broken flashbacks from multiple perspectives, none of which the viewer can trust. I’m not sure the show trusts them either. Sanyukta and Jai keep coming up with theories that make them look like online conspiracy-theory nuts, not professional investigators; they chase evidence in a way that allows every episode to present a new suspect and countless red herrings. You can’t blame their boss for pulling them up for acting like complete normies. At one point, they find traces of blood being wiped from a suspect’s floor, but it turns out to be from an unrelated wrist-cutting incident, almost as if the story is determined to humiliate them at any cost. At another point, Naina’s parents catch a gory glimpse of the corpse because the door to the lab is carelessly left ajar by our heroes; protocol is a myth. At some point, it becomes tough to stay interested in who did it because there are too many players and convoluted clues. I could swear that Naina’s parents have two more children, except it’s treated as an inconvenient detail by a screenplay that trades subtext for naked text. It also pushes the boundaries of science-fiction when a reporter calls out a big politician on primetime TV for backing a rapist. In 2025.

This isn’t to say Search is a bad series. Perhaps I’m a bit harsher because it has no reason to be so basic, a ‘genre’ that television enthusiasts with little time and no bandwidth swear by. I like that it joins Dabba Cartel as a mainstream Hindi drama with a non-mainstream and Mumbai-adjacent setting: if DC unfolded in

Thane, Search embraces the cultural melting pot of Navi Mumbai with establishing shots of Vashi bridge. It’s a choice driven by geographical diversity as well as the breathing space for a crime drama to stay plausible; the film-making isn’t limited by its visual identity (or a lack of it). Flight timings play a key role, as if timed to sync with the inauguration of Navi Mumbai airport; talk about uncanny design. I also like Sagar Deshmukh’s turn as the victim’s grieving teddy-bear-to-tiger dad. The man’s breakdown on seeing the body at the crime site is one of the better moments; his decline feels like the rare (Broadchurch-coded) human aspect of a show that searches for formulas harder than the cops search for the killer.

However, none of these elements add up because the entire season ends on a cliffhanger. It’s like watching a show end mid-scene, not mid-narrative. Ironically, that’s where I felt the maximum suspense. With ten minutes to go in the last episode, the clock started ticking in my head; I began to wonder how the series would tie things up in such less time, especially because it doesn’t look like there’s anything explosive around the corner. It moves along serenely with no intent or urgency, and with the final minute remaining, the most horrific truth dawned on me: there will be no tying up, just a bunch of unresolved knots. I suppose Search is in it for a franchise run, but its rhythm often suggests that the case will be decoded in 6 episodes.

Its identity also suggests that Konkona Sen Sharma is the actor to reverse this genre fatigue. The trope of dysfunctional officers struggling to balance their personal (there’s always a rebellious daughter and passive-aggressive husband) and professional lives (badass women in male-dominated fields) is an old one — and there’s no such thing as an average Konkona performance. But here you can tell that, because the storytelling isn’t tall enough to reach her talent, she lowers the bar to reach the storytelling. Her tenor as Sanyukta Das looks templatised, particularly when Sanyukta reacts to the parallels between the case and her own motherhood. The writing leaves no room for a personality to emerge, almost like the performer is a footnote as long as the character emotes on a generic scale. It takes some doing for a show to flatten a generational artist like Sen Sharma for 6 episodes; this is perhaps the only thing that Search: The Naina Murder Case succeeds at. After all, it’s an investigative drama that aspires to be watchable, not memorable; “timepass” is precisely the opinion it strives for. It aspires to be content; cinema is merely a medium to get there.