Director: Shiv RawailWriters: Aayush Gupta, Shiv RawailCast: Kay Kay Menon, Babil Khan, Divyendu Sharma, R. Madhavan, Sunny Hinduja, Raghubir Yadav, Mandira Bedi, Juhi Chawla
Streaming on: Netflix
A tragedy sweeps through a city. The infrastructure collapses. Innocent civilians die. Nobody is held accountable. A bunch of unlikely government employees come together. Despite the lack of support and resources from above, they save countless lives. All this, while being haunted by their own demons through a night of terror and reckoning. The series expertly juggles multiple characters and arcs, juxtaposing the crisis with the calm and the personal with the social. The stakes remain high, the performances are physically riveting, the production design shines, and the action stays rooted in a sense of emotional integrity. By the end, a new meaning of heroism emerges — one that explores systemic rot and celebrates the resilience of the common man.
Except, this is actually Mumbai Diaries 2 (2023) we’re talking about here. The Railway Men thinks it is precisely this series — it’s not. It uses the same template — the dramatisation of a real-world calamity — and becomes a prime example of how not to use it. I know that’s a cruel way to make a point, but I’m not the cruel one here. Blame it on the four hour-long episodes that reframe one of the darkest chapters in Indian history as a hammy soap opera (or a musical without the music). This needn’t necessarily be a bad thing: Disaster Pulp is also a genre. However, this is the sort of filmmaking that’s too artificial to be effective. I’ll circle back to this in a bit. One step at a time.