After long, we will get to watch Karisma Kapoor in Zee Studios’ noir thriller “Brown,” the only Indian show at the Berlin Series Market Selects platform.

Spanning a successful career from 1990s and early 2000s, Kapoor took time off to devote time to her family and we last saw her in“Mentalhood” for streamer ALTBalaji in 2020.

The series is based on the 2016 novel “City of Death” by Abheek Barua, adapted by Digvijay Singh, Sunayana Kumari and Mayukh Ghosh and directed by Abhinay Deo (“24: India”). It follows Rita Brown (Kapoor), a  recovering alcoholic, ace detective in the Kolkata police force belonging to the city’s small but influential Anglo-Indian community, who is assigned to the murder case of a young woman from a well-connected family.

Apart from not wearing any makeup to achieve a worn-out look for her character, Kapoor also used method acting techniques to enhance the role. Someone who rarely consumes alcohol in real life, Kapoor would skip dinner, have a few drinks and pass out in order to wake up with a hangover. A non-smoker, she learned to roll a cigarette. The actor also trained with a language coach to learn the Bengali language that is native to Kolkata and to speak a few words of it and English with an Anglo-Indian accent.

The city of Kolkata is an important character in “Brown.

The cast also includes veteran actor Helen making her comeback, Soni Razdan, Surya Sharma and K.K. Raina.