Shantaram has been canceled by AppleTV+ after its first season

Just prior to the season finale episode, which will be released tonight on AppleTV+, the show Shantaram starring Charlie Hunnam has been axed by the streaming service. Stantaram is based on the lengthy 900-plus page novel by Gregory David Roberts and had a huge production with the ambitious, epic scope of shooting across two continents. Both of which had been impacted by the COVID pandemic.

The series started filming its first season, but production came to a pause in February 2020 when the pandemic was taking shape. Since the show filmed in multiple countries, production was not able to resume until May 2021 for the remaining ten episodes of the season. Deadline reports that the show hadn’t quite taken off as much as the streaming service’s more popular titles, such as The Morning Show and Ted Lasso.

The plot for the series involved “following Lin Ford (Hunnam), who escapes a maximum-security Australian prison, reinvents himself as a doctor in the slums of 1980s Bombay, gets entangled with a local mafia boss and eventually uses his gun-running and counterfeiting skills to fight against the invading Russian troops in Afghanistan. All the while he is falling for an enigmatic and intriguing woman named Karla (Antonia Desplat) and must choose between freedom or love and the complications that come with it.”

The series featured a big cast of international based actors such as Shubham Saraf, Elektra Kilbey, Fayssal Bazzi, Luke Pasqualino, Alyy Khan, Sujaya Dasgupta, Vincent Perez, David Field, Alexander Siddig, Gabrielle Scharnitzky, Elham Ehsas, Rachel Kamath, Matthew Joseph and Shiv Palekar.

The book by Gregory David Roberts had a history of start-stops in being adapted into film projects, one of which was to star Johnny Depp. The show got the greenlight from AppleTV+ and was executive produced by showrunner Steve Lightfoot. Bharat Nalluri had directed and also executive produced. Other EPs include Andrea Barron, Nicole Clemens, Steve Golin, Justin Kurzel and Eric Warren Singer, who co-created the series with Lightfoot. The, now canceled, series was produced for Apple by Paramount Television Studios and Anonymous Content’s AC Studios.

What do you think? Should there be another attempt at adapting the epic works? Did you enjoy the show? Sound off!