Pradeeps of Pittsburgh boss says dead rabbit scene was real

“The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh” creator and showrunner Vijal Patel said the dead rabbits dumped on the Pradeeps’ doorstep and the hunting trips with white Christian neighbors are all real-life events in which he finds humor could. In fact, it was these challenges that ultimately motivated him to create the Prime Video series in the first place.

“Dead rabbits, white hunting neighbors who are very Christian and took us on hunting trips, or like, ‘Hey, let’s go hunting.’ I say, “I’m not going hunting.” [and they’re like,] “But it will be fun, like time for a brother,” Patel told TheWrap in a press interview for the show, which premiered Thursday.

The hunting trip takes place in Episode 5: “Interrogation Log #5”. As Patel explained, “Those challenges, the fact that everyone saw it as something terrible, and to me sometimes it was kind of funny, or kind of amusing, or kind of stupid.”

Starring Naveen Andrews, Sindhu Vee, Arjun Sriram and Ashwin Sakthivel, the comedy series is about an Indian family and the events in the first few months after they move to America. In Episode 1: “Interrogation Log #1,” viewers meet the family from U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services, where they are being interrogated as part of an investigation into the fire in the house next door. As they recall the events leading up to the fire, the series recalls their arrival in the United States and their earliest encounters with their new American neighbors, the Mills family.

In addition to settling in a new country, they contend with abusive racists, face mispronunciations of names, and pushy, offensive suggestions that they abandon their religious beliefs.

Tensions rise in the neighborhood’s dead-end street when the Pradeeps find five dead rabbits on their doorstep. Patel said the shocking reactions he’s received since telling the true story over the years are exactly why it’s “important” to have it on the series because it shows the resilience of immigrants .

“Because everyone thinks this is the end of the road for immigrants. I thought, ‘No, this is just a little speed boost,'” he said. “The immigrant story is full of so many challenges that it’s not even a question of ‘turning around.’ It’s like, ‘No, we’re going to deal with it.’ That’s when I realized the story needs to be told. So I think, let me just categorize things that really happened in my life into… the crushes and all those things that really came from my life.”

However, Patel also made sure that whoever left the lifeless rabbits in real life was a “fucking idiot.”

“If I tell you that [dead rabbits] When you tell people a story, people say, “Oh, that’s terrible.” And I think, ‘That’s funny.’ The funny thing is, it wasn’t that terrible for me because I was a kid,” he remembers. “It wasn’t that bad for my father that we should move back to India, because no. He came here because of a dream, and it was an important thing. So to the classic white person, these things seem like the worst thing in the world. It’s not the worst thing in the world for an immigrant. The worst thing in the world has already happened, we uprooted our entire lives and moved to America.”

All eight episodes of The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh are now available to stream on Prime Video.