Is Black, White and Gray – Love Kills the real true crime series that brings much-needed realizations? Let’s dissect!

Given its coincidental timing, Black, White and Gray– Love Kills could easily be our very own YOU, a gritty crime series that dares to be more than murders, bodies and blood!

What is it about murder mysteries and true crime dramas that draws us in so relentlessly? Is it the layered excavation of the human psyche or the strange comfort we find in trying to understand the unknowable? Do we seek catharsis in these narratives, or have we started indulging in something darker where another’s pain momentarily soothes our own? These questions haunt me every time I binge on a well-made crime thriller. Why do I need to know who did it and why they did it? Whatever the reason, there’s no denying the genre’s hold on us. It has built a place in the streaming space with a list of tropes and stylised clichés. But that’s where Black, White and Gray – Love Kills steps in! Across six episodes, it cuts through the noise not just to tell a gripping story, but to turn the lens back on us, confronting our own part in romanticising crime and challenging the comfort we find in simplified answers.

Also Read: Is Shonen the ultimate choice for Indian fans? Decoding the anime fandom's pull towards the genre

The show’s compelling strength lies in how seamlessly it mimics a typical true crime drama, complete with gut-wrenching twists and turns that leave you binge-watching episode after episode. Set in Nagpur in 2020, the series follows a UK-based documentary filmmaker who journeys into unearthing a world in India where some of the country’s darkest truths don’t just live, they thrive. He begins documenting the story of a young man accused of killing four people: the woman he loved, a police officer, a young boy, and a Malayali driver who has since disappeared. The police are on the hunt for this alleged serial killer. 

On the surface, it feels like a familiar investigative narrative unpacking what happened, how it happened, and ultimately, who is to blame. But as the end of the first episode makes it clearer that everything we thought we knew is pretty much a lie, the show begins to unravel not one, but many versions of the “truth.” This is where it hits us. It’s not the plot twist alone, but its refusal to settle for a single perspective. In a world obsessed with finding clear-cut answers, Black, White and Gray – Love Kills boldly asserts that there is no one absolute truth. 

Let’s unpack how the show pulls this off.

The groundbreaking narrative structure

The show sets itself apart by being an inventive, genre-defying narrative form. It unfolds like a docu-fiction, blending investigative interviews with dramatic re-enactments of the crime. Much like what you’d see in Sansani or Vardaat, but far more nuanced and cinematic. The docu filmmaker interviews a range of characters: the chief investigating officer, the victim’s best friend, a female constable, a hired hitman, the families of the deceased, an eyewitness, the accused’s parents, and finally, the accused himself. These interviews are intercut with dramatic representations of the events alleged to have unfolded. At first, you’re drawn in, believing what you see and hear, taking each detail as evidence. But when you start to question the reality of the real people, it hits that even the documentary is staged. And you realise it's a mockumentary! Every tension, confession, and “truth” has been curated. And that is where the gutted reality lies. It exposes how easily we suspend disbelief and feed our obsession with neatly packaged narratives, no matter how disturbing. 

Two people from different backgrounds chose to love, and difficult circumstances pile on one by one, each descending into a trail of corpses. And yet, instead of horror and inevitable destiny, we find ourselves gripped, asking how they will survive and make it. You get so invested in the logic of “everything happens for a reason” that we lose sight of the fact that murder after murder is taking place. Heads are smashed in. A knife is driven into a neck. A car runs someone over. Someone gets shot point-blank. And we’re too busy analysing motives and building theories. That’s the perverse effect of true crime! It makes us care more about the how and the who than the fact that a human life was lost. Making the victim a footnote in their story. Perhaps that’s why the camera lingers so long on the interviewees. Even if fictionalised, their denials, pauses, and body language reflect back at us, asking whether we, too, are complicit in the spectacle.

The humans in the story

The series's tone shifts when the accused’s interview enters the mix. What once felt like a usual run-of-the-mill gripping true crime thriller suddenly begins to breathe, giving space to the human stories buried beneath the sensationalised one-sided narrative. With each character recounting their version of the events, what they saw, felt, or chose to believe, suddenly, the narrative unravels the tangled web of confirmed bias that defines the fabric of our society. Each perspective adds a new crack in the façade of objective truth. The furious cop calls out "whitewashed propaganda," for being too sympathetic to the accused. 

The female constable wrestles with duty and conscience. The girl’s best friend becomes a mouthpiece for the cost of moralism in an increasingly cynical world. The hitman, casually, lays bare the brutal inevitability of a driver’s son falling for a powerful politician’s daughter. And then there’s the highly articulate accused himself, so painfully believable in his grief and reasoning that you begin to question your own biases, your sympathy shifting uneasily from one person to the next.

Perhaps that’s why the series uses a UK-based filmmaker as its central interviewer; he provides a much-needed foreign gaze, neutral and distant objectivity. And just as deliberate is the contrast in casting as known actors play the characters in the dramatised recreations, while unknown, unpolished faces inhabit the documentary interviews. It builds a blurred line between fact and fiction so convincingly that it feels almost surreal when the dead are resurrected. In doing this, the show reveals a discomforting truth: in our search for a villain or hero, we often ignore that every person in a crime story is, first and foremost, a human being shaped by their environment and perspective.

The social commentary hiding in plain dight

Interestingly, this mockumentary format quietly exposes the dangerous narratives we often take at face value. The show embeds its most scathing social critique in the most dangerous and almost non-existent margins. Take, for instance, the young couple forced to rent a room in a shady lodge simply because there's no safe or legitimate space for their romance, only to be caught in a sudden police raid. Or the way the girl’s family and law enforcement jump to the conclusion that she must have been kidnapped and raped. 

Why? Because she’s from a "good family," and he is from a lower strata, so the idea that she could have left willingly, perhaps even initiated the escape, is unthinkable. Then there’s the media, as usual, loud, biased, and always first to the scene. Long before the justice system has its say, news anchors are already delivering verdicts, conducting media trials that not only shape public opinion but actively influence the course of real-life investigations. Truth isn’t found; it’s manufactured for convenience and one's benefit!

And when it comes to protection or salvation? There's none to be found, not in left-wing journalists who pretend neutrality, not in well-meaning but helpless parents, and certainly not in the system. Everyone is left to fend for themselves. It’s a brutal reflection of the post-truth era we live in, where love is too fragile to survive, and hatred, paradoxically, is easier to sell, in fact, even safer to consume. Though impressively, the show does what not many series have been able to in recent times - make these statements under the guise of the genre that neither names its characters nor pinpoints anything directly. So you can't outrightly call it propaganda, a liberalist agenda-based art piece or anything!

Rage gets commodified, accountability is demanded and punishment for the criminal is romanticised as justice served. But what about the crime that society commits? What about loss of love and misplaced grief? We live in a time where hatred is the economy, and anger its currency, making Black, White and Gray, honest, neutral portrayals of truth! Not because it avoids conflict but because it dares to question every angle, even that of a documentary filmmaker. 

As the season concludes, you're not left with answers but examining your biases, realising that the so-called "truth" might be another well-told story. Because the reality is that nothing lives strictly in black or white; everything survives in the uncomfortable shades of grey, under the shadow of silently whispered statements we deliberately choose to ignore!

Black, White and Gray- Love Kills is currently streaming on SonyLIV!

For more such stories, follow us on @socialketchupbinge