“The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh” creator and showrunner Vijal Patel said the dead rabbits that were placed on the Pradeeps’ doorstep and hunting trips with white Christian neighbors were all real-life events he’s been able to find humor in. In fact, it was those challenges that ultimately motivated him to create the Prime Video series in the first place.
“Dead rabbits, white hunting neighbors who are very Christian who brought us on hunting trips, or like, ‘Hey, let’s go hunting.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t f–ing hunt,’ [and they’re like,] ‘But it’ll be fun, like bro time,’” Patel shared with TheWrap in a press junket interview for the show, which premiered Thursday.
The hunting trip takes place in Episode 5: “Interrogation Log #5.” As Patel explained, “These challenges, the fact that everybody saw it as something horrible, and to me, sometimes it was kind of funny, or some kind of amusing or kind of stupid.”
The comedy series, which stars Naveen Andrews, Sindhu Vee, Arjun Sriram, Sahana Srinivasan and Ashwin Sakthivel, follows an Indian family and the events that take place in their first few months after moving to America. In Episode 1: “Interrogation Log #1,” viewers meet the family from inside U.S. Immigration and Naturalization where they’re being interrogated as part of an investigation into their neighbor’s house fire. As they recall the incidents that went down leading up to fire, the show flashes back to their arrival in the States and their earliest encounters with their new American neighbors, the Mills family.
On top of settling into a new country, they grapple with slur-slinging racists, are subjected to name mispronunciations and pushy, offensive suggestions to convert out of their religious faith.
Tensions rise higher in the neighborhood cul-de-sac when the Pradeeps finds five dead rabbits left on their doorstep. Patel said the shocking responses he’s received since sharing the real story over the years is exactly why it was “important” to have in the series, because it shows the resilience of immigrants.
“Because everybody thinks this is the end of the road for immigrants. I’m like, ‘Nah, this is just a little speed bump,’” he said. “The immigrant story is full of so many challenges that this isn’t even like a thing of, like, ‘Turn back.’ It’s like, ‘Nah, we’re going to deal with this.’ That is when I realized the story needs to be told. So I’m like, let me just put stuff that really happened in my life in … the crushes and all that stuff is really from my life.”
However, Patel also made sure to point out that whoever left the lifeless rabbits in real life was a “f–king moron.”
“When I tell that [dead rabbits] story to people, people are like, ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s funny.’ What’s funny is, to me, it wasn’t as awful because I was a kid,” he recalled. “To my dad, it wasn’t so terrible that we should move back to India because, no. He came here for a dream, and it was an important thing. So these things to your classic white person, seems like the worst thing in the world. To an immigrant, that’s not the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world already happened, we uprooted our whole life and we moved to America.”
All eight episodes of “The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh” are now streaming on Prime Video.
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