Apple TV’s Ambitious $100M Cancelled Crime Drama Deserves a Second Look

Apple TV has always been quite extravagant with its budget. The streamer offers an impressive array of productions, A-list actors, and acclaimed series that truly seem worth every penny. However, few series can represent this idea the way Shantaram does, the show that was launched on Apple TV in 2022 and was canceled after just one season.

The series is based on the 2003 novel by Gregory David Roberts, inspired by the author’s life. It depicts a vast story full of intrigue, crime, reinvention, guilt, and an inability to escape the past. Moreover, the show features many international settings, several gangs, romantic adventures, political manipulations, and dozens of supporting characters that could certainly have made for much more than 12 episodes. That excess is sometimes its biggest weakness and part of what makes Shantaram worth another look.

What Is Apple TV’s ‘Shantaram’ About?

Image via Ben King /©Apple TV+/Courtesy Everett Collection

The series begins in 1980 with Dale Conti (Charlie Hunnam), an Australian convicted bank robber and former paramedic who escapes from Pentridge Prison and flees the country. Armed with a false passport and a new identity as Lindsay “Lin” Ford, he lands in Bombay, where he hopes disappearing into a city halfway around the world will give him a chance to start over.

After arriving in Bombay, Lin befriends Prabhu (Shubham Saraf), a charismatic local tour guide who introduces him to the Sagar Wada slum and the colorful expatriate community surrounding a bar called Reynaldo’s. Lin soon becomes entangled with Karla Saaranen (Antonia Desplat), a mysterious woman with connections to the city’s criminal underworld, and finds himself pulled into increasingly dangerous situations involving drug dealers, gangsters, corrupt politicians, sex workers, journalists, and police.

Lin’s attempt at reinvention takes another turn when he begins treating sick residents of Sagar Wada. His medical knowledge makes him useful to a community struggling with poverty and disease, but it also attracts the attention of Abdel Khader Khan (Alexander Siddig), a powerful crime lord with his own plans for the neighborhood. Before long, Lin is caught between his desire to help people and the criminal world he keeps insisting he wants to leave behind.

Lin is trying to become a better man, but his efforts rarely come without consequences. Sometimes his good intentions make things worse, sometimes helping one person means making a deal with someone dangerous, and sometimes his attempts to escape his past simply create another version of it.

Charlie Hunnam Is Excellent as a Man Running From His Past

Image via Roland Neveu /©Apple TV+/Courtesy Everett Collection

Hunnam is the biggest reason to stick with Shantaram. Lin could easily have become a standard tortured antihero: handsome, mysterious, morally conflicted, and forever talking about redemption, but Hunnam gives him more vulnerability than that. There are obvious similarities between Lin and Jax Teller, the character Hunnam played on Sons of Anarchy. Both are men who can handle themselves in dangerous situations but have a complicated relationship with their own moral compass. The difference is that Lin is actively trying to escape the person he used to be. He wants to believe that helping the people of Sagar Wada can somehow balance the damage he caused before arriving in Bombay.

Lin can be selfish, reckless, dishonest, and frustrating, but the performance never loses sight of the person beneath it all. The series repeatedly asks whether good deeds can compensate for bad ones, and Hunnam makes that question feel personal rather than philosophical window dressing.

He also benefits from an ensemble that keeps the show from becoming a one-man production. Saraf brings warmth and humor to Prabhu, who gradually becomes one of Lin’s most important relationships; Siddig is terrific as Khader Khan, a gangster who genuinely seems to believe that his criminal empire can coexist with his desire to protect his community; Desplat gives Karla an appropriately elusive quality, while Fayssal Bazzi makes Abdullah into a compelling presence as Khader’s trusted lieutenant. The show is at its best when these characters collide, and nobody gets to be entirely right.

‘Shantaram’ Is a Crime Drama With a Surprisingly Big Heart

Image via Roland Neveu /©Apple TV+/Courtesy Everett Collection

For all the guns, gangsters, drugs, corruption, and prison escapes, Shantaram is ultimately focused on what people do after they have already ruined their lives. Lin’s journey through Bombay is built around second chances, but the show wisely complicates the idea. Redemption isn’t a clean process. Lin can help establish a makeshift medical clinic and still become involved with a crime lord. He can save someone’s life and then make a decision that puts someone else in danger. He can genuinely care about Sagar Wada while also using the community to convince himself he’s paying off an old moral debt, which makes the series more interesting than a conventional redemption story. It’s asking whether those categories mean much when every decision creates another consequence.

The production itself also deserves credit. Shantaram is gorgeous television, with expansive locations, detailed period production design, and a sense of scale that is increasingly rare on television. The series was filmed across Australia and Thailand, with production plans disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and India’s changing filming restrictions.

Now that its one and only season is complete, there is no waiting for another season that will never arrive. Viewers can simply sink into the 12 episodes, get lost in its version of 1980s Bombay, and decide for themselves whether Lin Ford’s journey was worth following.