From the moment the eponymous family of “The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh” sets foot in the United States we can see their immigration journey will be defined by patience and understanding – theirs, and for Americans.
The family’s first encounter with U.S. Border Patrol shows its agent willfully mispronouncing their names, blurting out Soda instead of Sudha, followed by Mohawk (Mahesh); Bonnaroo (Bhanu); Camel (Kamal) and Window (Vinod).
Mahesh, the family patriarch (Naveen Andrews, “Lost”), politely corrects the man – “But pretty close! Chuck – great name. Hard to mispronounce!” – before telling the stone-faced border officer, “We’re moving here. Why? Because America is full of opportunity. And as Vedic scribes of ages past so prophetically wrote in –”
But America’s finest border agent doesn’t care, interrupting Mahesh with a hard passport stamp and an emotionless, “Welcome to America, Par-dips.”
“The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh” follows the comic beats and curves of a classic broadcast sitcom while taking advantage of its Prime Video/Freevee platform by allowing its characters to curse. If you were in this family’s shoes, you’d drop a few swear words too.
Mahesh, an engineer who scores a Space X contract, uproots his thriving, stable family from India, for frigid Pittsburgh, where someone leaves dead animals on their doorstep as a greeting. The factory Mahesh rents to construct his rocket components used to manufacture dildos — kind of a step down from what he’s accustomed to.
In India Sudha (played by British comedian Sindhu Vee) is a respected surgeon, but the Pittsburgh hospital where she’s hoping to work is slow-rolling her medical licensure’s approval. Anxiety has gripped Kamal (Arjun Sriram) so tightly that he’s gone mute, while his sister Bhanu (Sahana Srinivasan) embraces American culture wholeheartedly, especially its tradition of teen horniness.
And little Vinod (Ashwin Sakthivel), the comedy’s pint-sized scene-stealer, can’t help but see a silver lining in everything, including his outcast status at school. “My youngest is an optimistic doofus,” says Sudha, a self-described “greatest mother in the world.”
Let’s rewind our collective memory to 2017 for a moment, when studio execs worried aloud about leaving ratings and ad dollars on the table by ignoring “real” America.
A year later, the midseason return of “Roseanne” pulled monster-sized ratings for ABC and led MAGA to claim it as theirs. The show even took swipes at its fellow ABC comedies during an episode's opener when Dan and Roseanne slept through primetime, and he remarks, “We missed all the shows about black and Asian families.” She curtly responds, “They’re just like us. There. Now you’re all caught up.”
All that was before Roseanne Barr went on a racist tirade on what was then known as Twitter, resulting in her firing and the show moving forward without her. The six-episode final run of “The Conners” is expected to debut midseason, and though its audience was modest, the series' modulation from partisan pandering to grounded storytelling carried it through seven seasons.
That means it also lived through a network comedy era that saw the end of “Last Man Standing” and the rise of “Abbott Elementary” and its success with telling hilarious stories about teachers and teaching in a lower-income community – “slice of life stories," as that show’s creator, Quinta Brunson, once described to the New York Times.
People tired of watching heated Twitter arguments invade their shows, Brunson observed while also noticing how much race became the focal point of shows like “Black-ish” and “Fresh Off the Boat.”
“The white shows got to just be white, but a lot of the shows with people of color were about the color of the people and not about stories of the people,” she said.
The “Abbott” difference is that while the cast is primarily Black, the show asks the audience to connect to its characters' quirks, hopes and challenges, most of which have to do with a lack of resources and the creativity it takes to accomplish anything worthwhile.
“Abbott” works because it’s about people whose social and economic class designation brought them to the same leaky vessel and challenged them to steer it. Something similar is at play with “Happy’s Place” and “The Pradeeps,” albeit with distinct variations.
In the opening moments of “Happy’s Place,” Bobbie counsels her best friend and bartender Gabby (Peterman in a classic “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” casting) to remember that people come to Happy’s Place to leave their troubles behind, instructing to go out and show customers the smiles on their faces, “not the tears in our eyes.”
A person searching for dual meanings in every line of dialogue might interpret this as the show’s means of justifying its avoidance of the obvious – that Bobbie’s sainted father not only had a side kid but with a Brown woman.
Escobedo is a Latino actor, as is fellow ensemble player Pablo Castelblanco, who plays the bar’s accountant Steve. Peterman’s Gabby works beside Tokala Black Elk’s Takoda, the joint’s deadpan, sensible version of Woody from “Cheers.”
But “Happy’s Place,” co-created by Julie Abbott and Kevin Abbott, is initially more interested in mining the generational conflict between Bobbie and Isabella. That tests Bobbie’s patience for her new kid sister’s Gen Z sense of fairness and Bobbie’s assumption that things can and should only work as they always have.
Kevin Abbott, its showrunner, was an executive producer on “Reba” and “Last Man Standing,” the latter of which catered to a conservative audience. But aside from its star Tim Allen, "Last Man Standing" strived to present its comedy from all sides of the partisan spectrum. McEntire has made a career-long practice of publicly staying out of politics; viewers shouldn’t expect that to change now.
If this show gets picked up, its intentional camp-out on middle ground may be the reason. Writing quality is a more significant factor, of course; no celebrity’s star power is enough to blind viewers to a script’s humor deficit. (Fortunately the first two episodes of “Happy’s Place” are delightful.)
But, like the dearly departed previous of Bobbie’s bar said, there’s wisdom in offering a respite from the worries of the day by retraining the audience’s focus to appreciate the ways we’re alike instead of perceived differences.
Unless, we should say, those differentiations are superpowers, as they’re presented in “The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh.”
Sliding this new series into the paroxysmal dialogue over immigration and diversity would seem easy enough, except for the fact that Vijal Patel didn’t create the show as a clapback to current events. "The Pradeeps" is partly autobiographical and patterned after shows like “Black-ish” and “The Middle,” both of which Patel worked on. (It also has executive producers Sara Gilbert and Tom Werner in common with "Roseanne" and "The Conners.")
“The Pradeeps" plays with similar flavors. It is structured as a “Rashomon”-style whodunnit unfurling two years after their arrival, with each family member offering their perspectives to a pair of Immigration and Naturalization Service officers (Pete Holmes and Romy Rosemont) who suspect their involvement in a local crime.
It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy although, to Mahesh and Sudha, it is their neighbors who are backward and judgmental, especially Megan Hilty’s busty Janice Mills, the smiling, backstabbing conservative Christian next door.
It’s also an immigrant experience story that isn’t specifically about immigration or the uglier views shaping misperceptions about it. An early example shows Mahesh’s new landlord making a wisecrack that he might be a terrorist. Mahesh doesn’t let that pass but rather asks him to say why he’d think that. “Not all brown people are terrorists,” Mahesh tells him.
“But all terrorists are brown,” the man declares confidently.
“Not really,” Mahesh gently responds. “Let me show you. I’m going to draw you a Venn diagram.”
Patel and his writers don’t ignore prejudice, preferring to spin ignorance as something to be acknowledged and defeated with intelligence and understanding. Vee’s rendition of Sudha is hilarious because her mother is certain of her superior intelligence and constantly reminded that doesn’t matter in the land of assimilation, i.e. going along to get along.
Mahesh manages better with Janice’s husband Jimbo (Ethan Suplee essentially reprising his “My Name Is Earl” role), and Bhanu’s hormones pull her toward their son Stu (Nicholas Hamilton), who happens to be the convenient combination of easy, dumb and within walking distance of her house.
In short, they are new neighbors figuring each other out and grappling with cultural clashes that don’t easily resolve without everyone giving each other the space to exist.
This show doesn’t demonize anybody – not the family or even Janice, whose cleavage hypnotizes Kamal in ways he can’t control. Not even the kid who bullies Vinod is portrayed as evil all the time. He’s an idiot, but one Vinod finds himself speaking to in a difficult moment with his other friends, and while his torturer is giving him a wedgie.
Neither does “Happy’s Place,” even as it flirts with making the youthful earnestness of Escobedo's character into a joke. Both introduce families of blood or choice into difficult scenarios or conversations that ask for grace and understanding, that are singular to their stories but also reflect a shared feeling.
“This place terrifies me,” says Kamal as he huddles in the dark, wishing he could go home. But the viewer and his family know that’s not going to happen, that the only direction is forward, and that their best chance is to figure out a common story.
All eight episodes of "The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh" are available on Prime Video and Amazon Freevee on Thursday, October 17. "Happy's Place" premieres at 8 p.m. Friday, Oct 18 on NBC. Episodes stream the next day on Peacock.
