At the outset, Hansal Mehta tells us that he doesn’t view Scoop as a biography or a true story. Sure, the Netflix series has its roots in crime journalist Jigna Vora’s book, Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison. But to the filmmaker, Scoop is an “investigative family drama” that explores a middle-class woman’s ambition and the price she has to pay for it. “It investigates the urban middle-class family and their aspirations. Nobody cares until you run into a vortex of [chaos], and then suddenly, the reporter becomes the reported. That was striking,” says Mehta.

Hansal Mehta