TV Talk: Comedic gem ‘Pradeeps of Pittsburgh’ premieres

Although it filmed in Toronto, don’t hold that against “The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh,” a genuinely smart, funny, entertaining and timely comedy that streams all eight first-season episodes Thursday on Amazon’s Prime Video and on Amazon Freevee.

Created by writer Vijal Patel (“The Middle,” “Black-ish”), who grew up partially in Monroeville, “Pradeeps” tells the story of a family of immigrants from India who settle in Pittsburgh’s suburbs, chasing the American dream, only to find culture clashes with their neighbors that puts them in the crosshairs of agents of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Each serialized episode features members of the Pradeep family (and their neighbors) getting questioned about events of their first two years in Pittsburgh, allowing for “Rashomon”-style flashbacks showing incidents from different characters’ points of view.

That framing device distinguishes “Pradeeps.” But at its heart, the show is a great family comedy in the vein of ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat” (2015-20), thanks less to the fact that both shows are immigrant stories and more that they share a fearless, ferociously funny matriarch character.

Sudha Pradeep (scene-stealing Sindhu Vee, “Matilda: The Musical”) would give Constance Wu’s Jessica Huang on “Fresh off the Boat” a run for her money. Sudha is a no-nonsense, supremely confident woman, a doctor in her home country made to jump through hoops before she can practice medicine in America.

“I’m looking at a zoo of people devouring sugar and lard,” she tells a Pittsburgh hospital HR rep by phone while pushing a cart through a grocery store. “Trust me, you’re going to need all the doctors you can get.”

When Sudha arrives at the produce section, the soundtrack cuts to Sophie B. Hawkins’ “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” as Sudha describes the scene before her as “veggie heaven.” That’s just one of three times that same music cue gets used in the first “Pradeeps” episode. It’s also used when romance-minded daughter Bhanu (Sahana Srinivasan) sees her redneck neighbor Stu (Nicholas Hamilton) pumping iron in his garage and when optimistic, young Vinod (Ashwin Sakthivel) get his first glimpse of a Pittsburgh garbage truck and decides he’s found his career calling as a garbage man.

Patriarch dreamer Mahesh (Naveen Andrews, “Lost”) moved the family to Pittsburgh to pursue his dream of building rocket parts for a Space X contract he’s won. But the move doesn’t go over well with eldest son Kamal (Arjun Sriram), who goes mute.

Sudha does not approve of Bhanu falling for Stu, especially after she meets Stu’s parents, Penguins jersey-clad nice-guy Jimbo Mills (Ethan Suplee, “My Name is Earl”) and his Christianity-proselytizing, domineering wife, Janice (2004 Carnegie Mellon University grad Megan Hilty, “Smash”).

What’s great about “Pradeeps” is that it’s largely — a few bits of profanity here and there excepted — an all-family show that encourages co-viewing among parents and children. And while the binge release could prove a roadblock to viewers finding the show, the serialized format and episodes’ cliffhanger endings encourage a binge.

Making ‘Pradeeps’

Among the show’s stars, Andrews is best known for his role as Sayid on another series that relied on flashbacks: “Lost.” It’s unusual to see Andrews in a comedy, and this one has a timely theme given the hostile climate in some quarters toward immigrants.

“If there’s anything I hope audiences take away from the piece, it’s don’t take things at face value,” Andrews said in a Zoom interview last month. “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

For “Pradeeps” creator Patel, the show marks his most personal project yet. His family moved from Ahmedabad, “the Pittsburgh of India,” he said, to Pittsburgh when he was 8 in 1982. Patel attended elementary school in the Gateway School District.

“It was the exact same experience,” Patel said of what the Pradeeps go through in the series. “We had those white neighbors. There was a blizzard (when we arrived).”

Patel said he was the Vinod of his family, happy and excited to explore his new home, even when Pittsburghers called him “dothead,” which also happens in “Pradeeps.”

“It didn’t bother me,” Patel said. “I was young so I didn’t have such a core identity of being an Indian, so it kind of rolled off my back, whereas the heaviness of that to an adult is different.”

There’s not a lot of Pittsburghese heard in “Pradeeps” — Patel said he wants the location to be relatable to all viewers — but there are a few uses of “yinz,” including by Hilty, the only cast member to spend a significant amount of time in Pittsburgh as a student at CMU.

“I’d call a friend of mine, who is very much from Pittsburgh, and I’d have him talk on speaker phone so (the actors playing characters from Pittsburgh) would hear it,” Patel said. “And I’d do the same thing for the Indian actors who aren’t from Ahmedabad: I would call my mom and put her on speaker phone so they could lock it in.”

Hilty, who is currently in rehearsals for the Broadway musical adaptation of the movie “Death Becomes Her,” said she’s not confident about performing a Pittsburgh accent.

“All I know is that I’m not great at it!” she wrote in an email. “I will say that there are varying degrees of Pittsburghese, so I’m just telling myself that Janice is on the lighter end of the dialect spectrum.”

There’s also a brief but hilarious cameo by Mt. Lebanon native Mark Cuban in the show’s season finale.

Patel’s time in Pittsburgh was relatively short — his family moved to Philadelphia when Patel was 14 — and he said the “big incidents” his family experienced are reflected in “Pradeeps.” There was no interrogation by the Immigration Service but Patel’s family did talk to the police.

“Police officers would say to us, ‘Hey, what was your experience?’ My parents were like, ‘Shut up,’ and I was like, ‘No, I want to tell my story,’ and they were like, ‘That’s ruining the narrative we’re presenting to the police officers,’ ” Patel recalled.

In the show, Sudha defends her storytelling exaggerations to the immigration agents, saying, “In India, when you tell a story, you always add a little masala.”

“One of the most glorious things about Indians is they love to tell a story and they love to embellish it,” Patel said. “But then I found that’s a very universal thing. It’s specific to Indian culture, yet I think every culture will see that in themselves.”

Patel said his original desire was to film “Pradeeps” in Pittsburgh. But due to a shift in the production schedule, “we lost the stage and crew because we couldn’t hold them for that long,” Patel said. “Like immigrants, we had to adjust our plan and Toronto presented a really good opportunity. But in a heartbeat I would have shot in Pittsburgh.”

Filmed from January through March 2023, the snow seen in the series is mostly real and complicated scenes set during summer months.

“There are scenes where we had to clear a wedge of snow to make it look like it’s summer, but if you were to tilt the camera it looks like Hoth, like Luke Skywalker’s riding a tauntaun through it,” Patel said.

“Pradeeps” does not resolve its story by the end of season one, which is a little worrisome given Amazon’s recent track record with half-hour series, which rarely get renewed.

“We’re gonna be the show that changes Amazon,” Patel said. “I pitched them season two and they loved it so much they ordered scripts for season two.”

A script order is not a renewal but it is a vote of confidence from a platform.

“We haven’t even premiered and they felt so invested in the story,” Patel said. “The second season is not yet produced or even ordered but it will blow your mind as much as and even more than season one.”

That may sound like typical Hollywood bluster. But given the high quality of “Pradeeps” season one, I’m inclined to believe it.