Well, we can’t say there was no warning. After all, how could a production weather a storm of script backlogs, scrapped episodes, an overhauled showrunner and director, lockdowns, location changes as well as actual monsoons and still emerge on the other side as a coherent, compelling series?Shantaram Season 1 Download
Shantaram, the much-awaited adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’s bestselling 1980s-set novel-cum-travelogue, finally arrives on Apple TV Plus after a fraught few years of development hell. Sadly, that time seems to have been wasted. This tale of a fallen man’s attempt to find both himself and redemption in various “exotic” lands has little self-awareness and few redeeming qualities.For years, Shantaram was the cursed production that was never going to be.Gregory David Roberts’ wildly popular novel was flying off the shelves in 2003 and the screen rights were sold soon after. Russell Crowe was attached, then Johnny Depp, and for a while there, it was Joel Edgerton. Peter Weir was going to direct at one point.After more than a decade of development hell, Shantaram the movie morphed into Shantaram the TV show.
In some ways, it makes more sense – streaming had overtaken cinema and the book runs more than 900 pages.But even as the TV production ramped up, te off-screen dramas weren’t over. At that point, in 2019, Oscar nominated screenwriter Eric Warren Singer had been tapped to write the scripts and Australian director Justin Kurzel was to be the set-up director.Two episodes were shot in Melbourne and Mumbai before it was shut down – the show wasn’t going in the right direction and, reported The Age’s Karl Quinn, the remaining scripts weren’t ready.By the time the cameras rolled again in mid-2021, this time in Thailand, Shantaram was basically restarting from scratch. There was a new showrunner, Steve Lightfoot (The Punisher, Hannibal), while Bharat Nalluri would direct the first episodes.