“Family Karma” Might Be a Breakthrough for Desis on TV - The New Yorker

“Family Karma” follows several desi families in Miami; theirs is the kind of wealthy, incestuous subculture that doesn’t need cameras to incite drama.Photograph by Tommy Garcia / Bravo

I remember the first time I saw an Indian-American—one of me—on reality TV. His name was “Mo”—Mohit—and he was a suitor on the thirteenth season of “The Bachelorette.” Tragically, Mo got way too drunk and was sent home during the first rose ceremony. But I think of him fondly, as a second-generation pioneer. Forget desis becoming the Surgeon General, or running Microsoft, or winning Pulitzers. That’s the stuff that a so-called model minority is supposed to do. Watching an Indian seek love and behave badly in front of millions on national TV—something the majority does all the time—offered a more delicious kind of belonging.

If Mo was a pioneer of the deeply American reality genre, we may now have the beginning of a migration in “Family Karma,” which premiered on Sunday, on Bravo. The show follows several desi families in Miami; theirs is the kind of wealthy, incestuous subculture that doesn’t necessarily need cameras to incite drama. An engaged couple must reconcile their warring mothers. Spicy discord between aunties abounds. Two best friends have a charming will-they-won’t-they vibe. A woman in her mid-thirties, recovering from a twelve-year relationship, contemplates freezing her eggs but can’t escape accusations that she’s trying to bed her male friend. A flamboyant, twice-divorced forty-four-year-old named Bali sports Bravo-ready hot pink and long Kardashian locks, as though she’s been waiting her whole life to be subsumed into the “Real Housewives” aesthetic. In Bali, we get the show’s major diva, and possibly its inciter-in-chief. Her position straddling the two generations on the show allows her to have twice as many feuds.

For decades, the best-known desi on TV was Apu, from “The Simpsons.” Later, there was Aziz Ansari’s Tom Haverford, on “Parks and Recreation,” a character whose whole shtick was to veer asymptotically toward whiteness. Today, Hasan Minhaj addresses a “New Brown America” on “Patriot Act,” and Lilly Singh holds a spot in the historically white, male late-night lineup. One of the better episodes of Ansari’s “Master of None”—“Indians on TV”—even managed a meta-reflection on racism in popular media. “Family Karma” strikes me not as an extension of the mainstream desi media that’s come before but as a counterpoint to it. Marriage, dating, parents’ and children’s opposing wills—“Family Karma” shares these preoccupations with “Master of None,” Gurinder Chadha’s “Bend It Like Beckham,” and Kumail Nanjiani’s “The Big Sick.” Unlike “Family Karma,” however, those earlier stories were often about second-gen kids fighting to date or marry white. “Master of None” and Mindy Kaling’s “The Mindy Project” saw their leads making out with so many cute Caucasians that I wondered if their creators were trying to make up for a thousand spurns on middle-school dance floors. In “The Big Sick,” Nanjiani’s alter ego, who’s pursuing a white woman against his parents’ wishes, stuffs photos of potential Pakistani brides into a cigar box.

By contrast, on “Family Karma,” brown people mostly date other brown people, and the dramas often stem from dating within one’s race. The engaged couple pursues a formal Indian engagement ceremony, to make peace with one side of the family. Brian, the cheery, reformed playboy, woos his brown best friend, a self-proclaimed “traditional Indian girl” he wouldn’t have considered a few years ago. For the first time that I can remember, we’re getting TV about the Indian-American community unto itself, not about its struggle to assimilate.

There’s another difference between “Family Karma” and its scripted predecessors, which has to do with the treatment of the first generation. Ansari, Nanjiani, and Minhaj are burdened with the question of how not to maim their parents in mining their autobiographies. Ansari dealt with this challenge in “Master of None” by casting his real-life mom and dad, neither of whom is an actor, as the parents of his alter ego, Dev. Many viewers loved this choice, for lifting the autofictional veil hanging over the show, and for countering the stereotypes critiqued in “Indians on TV”—here were real Indian parents. But the casting also felt treacly and avoidant. It kept the show from treating Dev’s parents as full, flawed characters, and demonstrated a protectiveness that’s bad for art—no viewer would dare judge Ansari’s adorable, hardworking mom and dad. Minhaj’s “Homecoming King” manages more complexity on the topic of parents, because of its specific and sometimes bizarre insights. (For years, Minhaj’s parents neglected to tell him that he had a sister.) Minhaj draws honest, if painful, humor from the distances between immigrant parents and their offspring: “You gotta be real. Brown love is very conditional,” he says. Minhaj’s dad walked out of the audience during a taping of “Patriot Act,” and the show turned it into a punch line on Twitter—quite the opposite of Ansari’s Bring Your Parents to Work Day.

The Bravo format requires that everyone get petty, and so “Family Karma” isn’t at all concerned with protecting its elders. These aunties and uncles aren’t martyred immigrants solely owed gratitude—they can be catty, gossipy. One auntie is rumored to have snubbed her future in-law at a three-day-long wedding, roping in her many relations to join her in the shunning. The camera catches an auntie telling an uncle that her daughter has chosen a “moron” as a partner. There’s tension between divorced parents and those in intact marriages. A mother wants her daughter married so she doesn’t become an “old maid with gray pubic hair.” Unfortunately, the aunties’ and uncles’ confessionals and confrontations are clumsier than their children’s: they’re less fluent in stoking their own dramas. A daughter asks her single father on camera why he’s not dating, and he looks ready to bolt. A bystanding auntie encourages her friend to address a long-running feud but then spends most of the interaction anticlimactically reassuring her that the dispute is the family’s own business. Did she miss the memo about how reality TV works? Still, the first generation’s arcs may make for decent B plots.

“Family Karma” isn’t entirely comfortable in its own skin. In the pilot, producers repeatedly ask, “How traditional are you?”—an outsider, white-gaze question. It’s also rough to watch cast members reduce a whole population to stereotypes. They declare that Indians are obsessed with image, one-upmanship, and family, as though those are uniquely desi characteristics, or as though these rich Hindus in Florida could speak for nearly 1.4 billion Indians. That’s not to mention the cringeworthy dabs of the “exotic,” such as the heavy-handed sitar music that is used to transition between scenes.

There’s a brief, surprisingly honest moment in Episode 2 that I keep thinking about. The second-gen men have gathered in a barbershop. They dish. The straight ones discuss whether they like white or Indian girls. Brian admits he’s never dated an Indian but says he’s now ready for his perfect desi girl. Another guy says he doesn’t take a relationship seriously unless the girl is Indian. This is not the kind of conversation we got from Ansari or Kaling, who mostly kept race out of their rom-com story lines. This kind of exchange was especially unlikely to appear in a conspicuously inoffensive show such as “Master of None,” because it’s a bad look—the men typecast desi women, and no one mentions dating other minorities.

Telling sometimes ugly truths about one’s own community isn’t just another step up the representation ladder—it’s precisely how we go from mere representation to the possibility of resonant narrative. Reality producers, freed from the impetus to make their characters seem admirable, may have stumbled into something richer than their higher-culture kin. Maybe a Bravo show—the aesthetic and sociocultural inverse of, say, an auteurish, Emmy-nominated Netflix special—is just what we need to uncork the real drama. Here’s hoping that “Family Karma” is part of a wave of highly watchable, more imperfect desis on TV.

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“Family Karma” Might Be a Breakthrough for Desis on TV - The New Yorker
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