Amazon Prime Video’s The Pradeeps Of Pittsburgh nurtures such intentionally spoofy characters, you can’t help laughing at their comic book posturings. The actors are largely NRIs so they end up looking and sounding like NRIs even before they are supposed to. Their accents are half-baked American and they keep slipping off whimsically and unannounced.
What remains is the sassiness and effrontery that come naturally to aggressive migrants. They think their adopted world should embrace them unquestioningly. Hence when the Pradeeps, Sudha (Sindhu Vee), and Mahesh (Naveen Andrews) arrive in Pittsburg just in time for the snow season, they expect not to be snowed under immigrants’ problems.
Whether intentional or not, the Pradeeps (from Hyderabad, which self-respecting Andhraite would assume that surname?) come across as diasporic caricatures. None of the actors has been briefed to play it down. It is a battle of excess out there.
Naveen Andrews is of course a known name to us. Years ago he had played Aishwarya Rai’s abusive husband in Provoked. The husband Mahesh in the Pradeeps Of Pittsburgh is just the opposite.
He is a lamb being led by his aggressive wife Sudha into an interrogation trap where the family is accused of burning down their neighbour’s house. Be warned that this series refused to rebuke ribaldry. Several phallic references litter the Pradeeps’ Pittsburgh pilgrimage.
The three children are not immune to sounding sexual although the youngest is barely 9..