New Delhi: After the release of Sony LIV’s Black, White & Gray: Love Kills, director Pushkar Sunil Mahabal got many calls enquiring about the ‘actual’ case that his web series is based on. Except, the ‘docuseries’ is entirely fictional.
The eight-episode show was released on 2 May and follows a working-class young man who is in hiding after being accused of four murders. Two years after this headline-grabbing case, filmmaker Daniel Gray (voiced by Edward Sonnenblick) is interviewing people who knew the victims. Throughout the show, Gray’s character remains an off-screen voice. The show features ‘real events’ interspersed with the documentary storyline.
The biggest challenge for Mahabal was creating a show with no reference points, no ‘actual’ case to rely on.
“I figured at some point people will realise it is all fake, but being able to convince that it’s not, is the fun,” Mahabal told ThePrint.
It is not just the audience that Mahabal managed to hoodwink. During production, several assistants thought that the documentary was real because they did not have access to the script. When the actor who plays the murderer showed up, they believed he was the actual perpetrator in a real case.
The devil is in the details, or rather, the edits of the show, which were written into the script by Mahabal. Obsessed with crime thrillers to the point of watching them as a form of unwinding, Mahabal decided to take a plunge into it and do his own experiment.
“I have watched and re-watched Jeffrey Dahmer interviews so many times that I have memorised everything he has said. But I felt I was not qualified to make a documentary. That’s why I opted for a mockumentary,” said Mahabal.
Although the director calls it a mockumentary, the more accurate term for the show’s format is pseudo-documentary, where the style of documentary filmmaking is used to show a fictional storyline.
It was Mahabal’s late-night binge–watching that helped him visualise the series.
Behind the ‘documentary’
According to an Ormax report, between 2019 and 2024, 52 documentaries were released on OTT platforms, of which 40 per cent are true crime documentaries. From Dancing on the Grave (2023), based on the Shakereh Khaleeli murder case, to House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths (2021), about the deaths of 11 members of a Delhi family, true crime documentaries have a ready audience waiting for their dose of adrenaline.
Mahabal, who has directed, written, and edited Black, White & Gray, toys with the idea that well-packaged content can be passed off as representing the truth.
“Even in the end, I did not want people to have clear answers—that was the intent and also the reason for the name of the show,” Mahabal said.
As Indian true crime shows garner massive viewership—Indian Predator: Murder in a Courtroom (2022) registered over 2.9 million views—Mahabal’s subversion of the genre questions the idea of an all-knowing narrator or filmmaker. In the documentary segment of the show, everything from the grainy CCTV footage to the interviews is meticulously staged.
Black, White & Gray has two segments—the ‘real’ people who give interviews to documentary filmmaker Gray and the reenactment of the crime, featuring actors such as Mayur More of Kota Factory fame. In the docuseries narrative, More’s character is simply named ‘The Boy’, and Palak Jaiswal’s character, the victim, is named ‘The Girl’. Sanjay Kumar Sahu plays the alleged killer.
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Unlearning acting
For the interviews, cinematographer Saee Bhope opts for the tripod and camera. A timer on the screen, audio ruffles, and found footage elements also establish the impression of the ‘real’. The scenes for the CCTV footage were almost entirely shot at night or in natural light. The addition of ‘witnesses’, friends of the victim, and other voices adds to the seeming authenticity of the narrative.
Before he was selected for the role, Mayur More did not find time to read the script owing to other shooting commitments.
“I felt guilty that I had not read at all. But Pushkar said, let it be and come directly to shoot. That actually helped to bring the character alive,” said More. It was the unique concept that made More want to turn up for all of the auditions before he was cast.
More underlined a different challenge while shooting for the show: unlearning the art of acting.
In the show, experienced actors had to look like they were facing the camera for the first time. Chetan Mhaske, who plays the ‘real’ cop in the series, is a theatre actor who looks indistinguishable from the cops in true crime documentaries. Sanjay Sahu, who plays the murderer, was given English dialogues before the shoot. They were then translated and spoken in Hindi so that there were fumbles and pauses, which made the segment appear ‘real’.
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An editor’s script
Mahabal took his time to write and edit the show. He figured out, even while scripting the show, that it would be an editor’s game. He was meticulous in editing the show in a way that creates moments of credibility while also questioning the viewers’ bias about the murderer.
The show took almost three years to be made, with the shooting schedule being only two months long. It was post-production that went on for seven months.
“I wrote the script as an editor. When an actor in the nonfiction is speaking, the scene cuts to the fiction part of the show. All of it was written in the script,” said Mahabal.
Mahabal worked as a music director for Marathi films such as Irada Pakka (2010), before realising he wasn’t very good at it. He then made a pivot to directing TV shows before making his first feature film, Welcome Home, in 2020. The survival drama is about two census workers who end up trapped in a house by two sexual predators. The film, a deep dive into patriarchy and sexual violence, was inspired by an actual incident in Nagpur.
After Welcome Home, Mahabal decided to delve into his favourite genre—crime documentary—which led to the creation of Black, White & Gray. In both the film and the web series, violence is not an embellishment but an essential part of the storytelling.
In the series, Mahabal deliberately keeps the two leads unnamed to create mystery and confusion. While the class differences are clear—the ‘Boy’ being a driver’s son and the ‘Girl’, the daughter of the driver’s boss—the director doesn’t add any other details that link the story to social inequalities.
“I didn’t want to create unnecessary conversations around class or caste or religion. The simple point is that the characters come from two groups that do not get along,” said Mahabal.
After the show came out, Mahabal got more than one call from fellow filmmakers, who wanted to know how he managed to get away with making an experimental show. OTTs, it is known in the industry, are increasingly relying on tried-and-tested genres. But Mahabal’s strategy was having the script ready, down to individual episodes while pitching it to producers.
“One of the characters says, we like to see people as either simplistic heroes or villains. We don’t have the understanding, time or IQ to appreciate nuance. This is happening with general content too, which angers me. So I guess my frustration came out through the show,” Mahabal said.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)