EXCLUSIVE: Delhi Crime Season 2 showrunner and director Tanuj Chopra has signed with WME.
The deal comes following the launch of the buzzy second run of Netflix’s crime procedural, whose first season made history in 2020 by becoming the first Indian show to win the Outstanding Drama Series award at the International Emmys.
Chopra took over showrunning duties from creator Richie Mehta for the second run, which debuted on the streamer August 26 and is from SK Global Entertainment, Golden Karavan and Film Karavan.
Previously an indie filmmaker, Chopra has written, directed and produced four grand jury prize-winning features including Punching at the Sun, a gritty movie about teens coming of age in post-9/11 Queens that was the first South Asian American film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. He also picked up awards for Chee and T, Grass and the improvised dark comedy Staycation, which won the LA Muse Fiction Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2018.
Chopra is currently in post-production on a short documentary about Brown University’s dynamo point guard Shayna Mehta, with support from the Center for Asian American Media. As Deadline reported last week, he is also developing a series based on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Devdas that is set up at Searchlight.
Raised in Silicon Valley, Chopa was awarded the Dean’s Fellowship at Columbia University, where he studied for an MFA in film direction and has since returned to as a lecturer, and was selected for the 2018 Sundance Episodic Lab, the Fox Global Filmmaker Initiative, and the Sony TV directors lab programs. He runs production workshops for at-risk youth in the Bay Area.
Delhi Crime Season 2 follows those same characters as the first – Shefali Shah’s DCP Vartika Chaturvedi, young cop Neeti Singh (Rasika Dugal) and right-hand man Bhupendra Singh (Rajesh Tailang) – as they attempt to solve a series of brutal murders of senior citizens in the middle-class neighbourhoods of South Delhi. It is loosely based on the Kacha-Baniyan gang murders in North India in the 1990s but is not an exact replica of a particular crime as with the first season, which followed the police’s hunt for the perpetrators of the infamous 2012 Delhi gang rape case.
“My hope was that we’d find a way to grow the show and pull in an audience that didn’t see the first season, perhaps because they couldn’t take the material, or did see it because they were familiar with the crime, and then discovered this beautiful cast of characters,” Chopra told Deadline of his approach to the new material. “My task was, ‘How do I take these amazing characters and pull them forward?’”
Chopra continues to be represented by Writ Large and Yorn, Levine, Barnes, Krintzman, Rubenstein, Kohner, Endlich & Gellman.
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