What do Mona Singh’s character in Kohrra 2, Kareena Kapoor Khan’s in The Buckingham Murders, Saif Ali Khan’s in Sacred Games, Matthew Goode’s in Dept. Q, and Kim Da-mi’s in the Korean show Nine Puzzles have in common? Different countries, different crimes, different personalities. Yet they’re all standing at the same gate lugging the excess baggage of their own backstories.
Event Context
The formula persists because it works. We know that procedurals take forever, that caseloads pile up, that unsolved cases means justice denied. No one comes away unscathed. So, even fictional detectives find that personal demons sneak into the workday (Mona Singh’s character in Kohrra 2 wasn’t just grieving a child, she was literally holding her marriage together by its last threads). For whodunnits, a flawed investigator seems somehow more real, more grounded. It’s the cost of the dirty job.
Defective Detectives do especially well in the streaming era. “In long format, you get time to delve into their personal lives and character arcs more,” says Randeep Jha, director of Netflix shows Kohrra (Season 1) and Trial By Fire and the film Halahal. When the lead investigator on the case has a lot going on, the external chaos of the crime mirrors their internal war, adding to the drama.
Jha says that modern life and nuclear families have become increasingly isolating, which makes audiences more interested in characters’ inner emotional lives. In his 1948 essay The Guilty Vicarage, WH Auden suggests that reading about crime and its resolution offers a subconscious catharsis. Perhaps watching a fellow human trudge through evil allows us to process our anxieties about the world too?
The trope is so familiar, it’s been parodied endlessly – even Bart Simpson, age 10, carries the weight of a hard suburban life when he’s trying to decode who’s trying to kill his aunts in one episode of The Simpsons. It can get a bit exhausting, admits Jha. “Sometimes it becomes obvious that the trauma has been included merely for shock value or to exploit those emotions.” If the grief, addiction or broken marriage aren’t necessary to the storyline, it’s not elementary, Watson. It’s just excessive.
From HT Brunch, July 25, 2026
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Team Analysis
While the term was coined in 1911 as a parody by Stephen Leacock, the trope itself was birthed in late-19th-century fiction. Edgar Allan Poe’s C Auguste Dupin was socially withdrawn but intellectually flawless. When Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes in 1887, he added cocaine use and social awkwardness, but these were treated as side-effects of genius rather than crippling flaws. Until 1929, British detective fiction was largely straightforward: Wealthy, aristocratic sleuths solved bloodless puzzles in country estates – a kind of Knives Out, with no knives actually drawn.
Match Outlook
Nearly every crime show or film these days – Officer on Duty (Malyalam), City of Shadows (Spanish), Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole (Norwegian), The Glass Dome (Swedish), Brown (Hindi) – features some kind of Defective Detective. The troubled, dysfunctional investigator’s flaws help crack the case, but the job is never enough to heal the scars. Our investigator must stay broken for the next puzzle.
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But after World War I and the Great Depression, crime-solving got a little dirty via hard-boiled crime fiction. Dashiell Hammett had worked as a detective and witnessed corruption firsthand, shaping his world-weary Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Raymond Chandler turned to writing after losing his job during the Depression, giving rise to the lonely, hard-drinking Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. In a world scarred by war, unemployment and institutional distrust, these new, cynical characters fit right in. “Society itself is full of people carrying personal burdens, and often their work becomes the one area where they can find meaning,” says US-based film reviewer Ajitesh Pathak.
