The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh is a new Amazon Prime comedy, following the story of one Indian family and their experience as recent immigrants to Pittsburgh. Told through a series of flashbacks from an F.B.I. interrogation room, the Pradeeps find themselves embroiled with a polar-opposite neighborhood family, leading to romantic, personal and professional tussles.
The show’s creator, Vijal Patel, based the series on his own experience, immigrating to the United States from India as a child and growing up in Pittsburgh. Patel went on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in engineering and business before becoming a television writer best-known for his work on the shows black-ish and The Middle.
90.5 WESA’s Priyanka Tewari sat down with Patel to talk about his journey from India to Pittsburgh, a brush with a career in finance and how he makes choices when writing South Asian characters in television.
Priyanka Tewari: You are a graduate of an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania, with degrees in engineering and business. So what drew you to comedy and screenwriting in the first place?
Vijal Patel: I love finance. I love math. I'm Indian. It's not racist to say that. I just do.
[And at the end of college,] I [had] accepted a job at Goldman Sachs. The week before I graduated, I was already shopping for suits to go work at Goldman Sachs and move to Manhattan when my best friend in college called me.
He said, “I'm going to pitch you the craziest pitch you've ever heard in your life. I think you should move to Hollywood to be a comedy writer. All you've ever done the whole time I've known you is just tell funny stories 20 to 22 minutes at a time. And that's what TV writing is.”
So I'm like, “Yeah, I have to try it.”
So that's really how I got into it.
Let's talk about the show. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why Pittsburgh? Why did the Pradeeps have to land in Pittsburgh?
Pittsburgh is so near and dear to me because when you watch the show, the first 15 minutes of the first episode [is my family’s story].
We had moved from Ahmedabad, India to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the dead of winter. We had no winter coats because you couldn't buy winter coats in India. When you come from a temperate climate, there's no Target there to just buy parkas. And we had kurta, we had pajama. My mom was wearing a sari. All that in the dead of winter.
Even the incident where, in the first episode, the Pradeeps somebody had put dead rabbits on their front porch, that happened to us. When I tell that story, people are mortified. Like, ‘Oh my God, there was this racist incident the first day you moved here that you also put in the show?’
I'm like, yeah, but that's funny. Because yes, it sounds mortifying, but to immigrants, that's not the worst thing that happened to them that day. They've upended their entire life. This isn't cataclysmic.
So I'm the little boy in the show. Vinod Pradeep my stand-in. My optimism, my love for Pittsburgh was off the charts. It was magical to me. As magical as India was to me as a little boy — [there were] monkeys and peacocks and elephants — Pittsburgh was a whole different thing. It was the forest, it was snow, it was hunters, it was the Pittsburgh Steelers. I'd never seen football [before].
All of that was my childhood and I love Pittsburgh. It is part of my DNA. That's why I wanted to put it in the title, because it really was a formative part of who I was and who my family was.
I really get excited when I see immigrant stories and brown people on a Western platform. At the same time, I pause when I see certain stereotypes. How do you decide, as a creator of a show, when to lean into and when to subvert stereotypes about Indian culture?
That's a great question because when people watch this show, they'll say certain things like, “Oh, I thought we were past this.”
In very first minute of the show, there's a customs inspector that completely butchers [the Pradeeps’] names.
Their names are Mahesh, Sudha, Vinod, Bhanu, and Kamal. And the inspector is like, “Okay, who do we have here? Soda, Mohawk, Bonaroo, Camel, and Window.”
Then Naveen Andrews’ character, Mahesh, corrects him. He's like, “No, actually it's Sudha, Mahesh, Bhanu, Kamal, and Vinod.”
And people are like, “Oh, you're making fun of Indian names.’
[But] I have always had to tell people what my name is. Always. Is it Vigil? Is it Virgil? Is it Vagil? Nobody ever gets my name right. Even in this day and age, I have to tell people my name.
And so my litmus test is if it's ever happened to me, I will put it in [the show]. I had South Asian writers and Indian writers on the staff who all had those experiences. Any time I'd say something, if they laughed, or I laughed at what they said, I'm like, “Okay, this is a relatable idea. Let's put it in.’
What's next for the Pradeeps and for you, Mr. Patel?
The show is doing really well. It's the number one TV comedy on the platform on Amazon. And so for the Pradeeps, it’s hopefully season two.
I love telling the story of this family and I want to continue telling the story of the Pradeeps because the message and the joy and the entertainment and the personalities are universal.
Season 1 of The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh is available now on Prime Video and Amazon Freevee.
