The Pradeeps Of Pittsburgh: The Cosy Chaos of Under-Prepared Indian Immigrants in America

“THE INDIAN ECONOMY RUNS ON SCAMS,” Mahesh, the gullible patriarch of the Pradeep family tells an officer inspecting his family’s immigration status in Amazon Prime Video’s churlish but likeable The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh. It’s a sequence that spells out the anxiety of an immigrant family trying to fit the thorny glove of American cosmopolitanism. The kind that views, only, through civilisational summaries. It’s the cost, maybe, of setting immigrant stories within the wider construct of Western opportunism. You are resigned to worship the opportunity of arrival and the bonanza of staying. Going back is tantamount to catastrophe. But the Pradeeps are colourful, whacky and innocent enough to invite both ire and wonder. Led by the always-watchable Naveen Andrews, this 8-episode series covers the cosy, yet chaotic upturn of arriving in the United States, untrained and under-prepared. The result is familiar, flawed yet never not watchable.

Andrews plays Mahesh, who is joined by his doting yet hyper-critical wife Sudha (Sindhu Vee) and three kids of varying eccentricities. Kamal (Arjun Sriram), the teenage boy is an anxiety-ridden mess, Bhanu (Sahana Srinivasan) is a horny teenager always on edge, while the youngest Vinod, is an impressionable dolt. Each of them has their own version of what America is and could be. Mahesh wants to launch a business, Sudha wishes to restart medical practice, while the kids are equal parts seduced and stunned by the winds of a new culture. To this backdrop of fitting in and falling out of estranged ideas and exiled lands, there is an ensuing investigation about a domestic fire, that unravels as a largely uninteresting mystery. The humour and the whimsy sticks. The mystery simply doesn’t.

The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh is obviously a direct descendant of Mindy Kaling’s sensationally successful Never Have I Ever. It’s neither as raunchy nor as focused, but offers a broader canvas of narrative fits and starts. There is no singular character arc as such in a series that borrows liberally from Kaling’s show but tries, valiantly, to essay its own path. The ‘Indianness’ in Pradeeps is far more central, shaping its conservative boundaries. It drives the show’s canonical ‘cuteness’ and its warm banality; nothing incisive or meaningful is ever uttered or meant. Everything happens as a comical sketch of sorts, performed by people who seem enamoured by the world they inhabit, unlike the one they are trying to create. It lends the show the texture of a daily soap, with a Wes Anderson-ian tilt of adorable nothings connecting one scene to the other.

Of the performances, Andrews is obviously the highlight. Even decades after landmark roles (The English Patient, Lost) put him in global conscience, the actor carries a certain broken elegance with his soothing, almost calming baritone. It’s the voice and face of the underdog and to the largely chaotic proceedings of a cuff-less show, he lends both character and charm. The others pull their weight too. But where the show really struggles is its casting of white characters. Loony, yet accommodating, they lurk but contribute little to the show’s depth except offering the American face of consumption and corniness — the dumb sporting coach, the exquisitely handsome teenager and the borderline offensive mother. All presented as frictional antecedents to the Indian family trying to root itself in a home of sorts.

For all of its familiarity and tokenisms, The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh is an endearing, if lightweight comment on the first-generation experience of landing in a foreign country, testing its waters and coming out the other side, scarred yet changed. It’s the prequel to Never Have I Ever and maybe the sequel to Mira Nair’s seminal The Namesake. The little, unruly, defiant yet ultimately submissive interlude between landing and seeding, arriving and settling. The show derives its whimsy from other places, but its cultural heritage carries over from decades’ worth of immigrant stories attempting to detach themselves from the burden of running away to many a promised land. It’s a kind of guilt that can only really be processed by retracing the awkwardness, and maybe even the trauma of the first few days, months and years. Do you remain who you are, or do you become a brand-new whole? In The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh, interestingly, each of the family’s five members moves at different speeds. Some find acceptance, some deny the obvious while others twist themselves into knots trying to spot the trail they expect to leave behind. Everyone’s on their own little journey.

On some level, stories about Indian immigrants trying to adjust to Western shores are essentially about departure. Of the gate being perennially visible, but the feet dragging, in comical, contradictory ways; tripping over cultural hangovers, unlearning rituals you assumed were indistinct from the Indian mind and body. Except, nothing truly stays forever. Only the separation, its dramatic worth, paints centuries worth of migration. In The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh, the Indian diaspora reprises the peculiarities we know of. But it’s the doggedness of it all, the whimsical goofiness that gives this done-to-death story a new cover if not material. It’s akin to a newly stamped page of the passport. Except this time, it’s been somewhere blithe and playful. Next time, it just needs to find something new to say.

The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh is streaming on Prime Video