Brown review: Karisma Kapoor is trapped in a cliche-ridden thriller

3 min readJun 5, 2026 03:49 PM IST

Karisma Kapoor-starrer Brown is streaming on ZEE5.

Brown review: Right from the beginning, Brown works hard at justifying it being named after its lead character. Rita Brown (Karisma Kapoor), a cop leading a murder investigation, is a workaholic– that she’s an alcoholic is part of it– who never takes her eyes off the ball, exhibiting the kind of single-minded obsession needed for a series like this to come alive.

And in its first couple of episodes, this 7-episode show, which has been hanging fire for a while, does grab our attention. The killing is brutal and seems ritualistic, hinting at patterns adopted by serial killers. Rita Brown’s trusty deputy Arjun Sinha (Surya Sharma), while capable of taking orders from a woman, isn’t as happy taking care of his ageing dad (K K Raina), who is slowly losing his faculties. And Rita herself, forgetting to eat, but never to drink, keeps fobbing off her caring mother (Soni Razdan) and grandma (Helen) when it comes to their joint efforts of making her move on from a past tragedy.

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But soon after, these two conflicted cops whizz past their specific troubles to fall into the Troubled Cop Trope, and then the tropes– and the red herrings– keep piling up.

The victim’s wealthy family is suitably suspicious: dad (Abhinay Deo), brother (Paresh Pahuja) and mother (Meghna Malik) all have things to hide. The victim’s shrink (Jisshu Sengupta) wants to reveal things his patient wanted to hide; her boy-friend, a scientist with a dodgy record, is getting dodgier by the minute.

The writing credits are shared amongst Diggy Sisodia, Mayukh Ghosh and Sunayana Kumari — the former was on the Kohrra team — which should have led to fresher strokes. But here things feel either undercooked, or much too familiar: it isn’t hard to twig on to the identity of the killer; someone burdened with, of course, a monstrous childhood.

Karisma, always capable of much more than keeping in step with Govinda’s jhatkas in their 90s Bollywood blockbusters, (watch Zubeida, if you haven’t), is bound by tropes. She’s made to be much too morose before becoming, unbelievably, almost overnight, bright and clear-eyed. That’s when the actor in her comes to the fore, but that’s too little, too late.

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Brown cast: Karisma Kapoor, Surya Sharma, Jisshu Sengupta, Ajinkya Deo, Soni Razdan, Helen, Paresh Pahuja, Meghna Malik, K K Raina, Kharaj Mukherjee, Purnendu Bhattacharya

Brown director: Abhinay Deo

Brown rating: Two stars