Black White & Gray uses the look of a true-crime documentary to make viewers question what they are seeing. Director Pushkar Mahabal’s six-episode Hindi series places a fictional documentary about murders alongside scripted characters connected to those killings, challenging the genre’s promise of certainty and the impulse to sort people into simple heroes and villains.
What is Black White & Gray about?
In Nandini Ramnath’s May 7, 2025 interview for Scroll.in, the series is described as following two interwoven strands. In one, filmmaker Daniel Gray pursues a true-crime documentary about murders attributed to a young man. In the other, actors portray people associated with the killings. The documentary footage and interviews within the series are fictional; the show is not presented as an actual true-crime documentary.
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That nested setup makes the documentary style part of the story rather than proof of its truth. A statement that sounds like testimony or an image that looks like evidence may be a performance, a feint, or simply one perspective among several. The viewer has to judge not only what happened, but also how the account is being shaped.
Why make the documentary strand fictional?
Mahabal says his interest in true crime began well before the series. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he watched Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer and Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer and wondered whether he could make a documentary of that kind. As a fiction filmmaker, he decided to invent one instead: “I felt, if I can’t make it, let me fake it.”
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The choice lets the series examine true crime’s claim to verity from inside its own conventions. Documentary form can feel authoritative, but form alone cannot guarantee that a story is complete or that its narrator is neutral. Mahabal says the series is built to make a final judgment difficult, suggesting that sensational crimes may not yield all their secrets to a tidy account.
How does the series make its documentary look?
Mahabal and cinematographer Saee Bhope gave the two strands distinct visual treatments, so viewers could tell which mode they were watching without treating the shifts as a puzzle for its own sake. For Gray’s documentary, they used small cameras for interviews and degraded the images to suggest footage shaped by the fictional filmmaker’s practice. The scripted strand has a separate visual style.
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The distinction was deliberate: the series wants viewers to question the authority of the documentary material, not lose track of whether they are watching it. Ramnath’s interview also reports that, during post-production, assistants initially mistook some staged documentary footage for real material. That anecdote illustrates how convincing the visual language could be; it does not establish that the series contains actual documentary evidence.
How did Mahabal write and perform the two strands?
Scenes and edit points came before a conventional outline
Mahabal says he did not begin by writing a conventional story outline. He started with scenes and dialogue, marking edit points in the script for transitions between the fictional documentary and the other strand. The method made the movement between modes part of the writing process rather than a layer added only after the story was complete.
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Restrained performances support the documentary effect
Mahabal describes the performances in the mock-documentary material as deliberately restrained. For Sanjay Kumar Sahu, who played the alleged killer, Mahabal says he wrote dialogue in English for the actor to translate shortly before takes. He wanted the resulting speech to include pauses, mumbling, and self-corrections rather than the polish of a fully rehearsed dramatic monologue.
What do the title and “no time for nuance” mean?
The title’s black, white, and gray framing points to Mahabal’s objection to reducing people to uncomplicated heroes or villains. “As the title suggests, the show is trying to prove that there is no black and white to crime,” he tells Ramnath. The series’ structure puts that idea into practice by withholding an easy, final sorting of the people and accounts involved.
The headline phrase “We have no time for nuance” is Mahabal’s provocation about the rush to judgment, not a measured finding about how audiences behave. In the interview, he says, “We don’t have the understanding, time or IQ to appreciate nuance.” The line expresses his frustration with a culture of quick conclusions; the series responds by making those conclusions harder to reach.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What production context and platform did the interview report?
Ramnath’s May 7, 2025 interview identifies Black White & Gray as a six-episode Hindi series on Sony LIV. That report does not confirm present-day availability in any particular territory, so viewers should check the service’s current local catalogue.
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The interview also reports that Mahabal is from Nagpur, trained as a Hindustani classical music vocalist, moved to Mumbai in 2006 intending to work as a music director, and later worked in television for six years. His first feature, Welcome Home, was made in 2020; Bhope also worked on that film, while Ankita Narang, its writer and producer, was creative producer on Black White & Gray. These background and production details are as reported in the interview.
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