Streaming the diaspora: how Netflix let the second generation tell its own story

The gatekept years

To feel the change, remember what preceded it. For decades American network television offered the diaspora one seat at the table at a time — the token doctor, the token best friend, the occasional short-lived show that was cancelled before it found its audience. Mindy Kaling's own The Mindy Project was dropped by its network in 2015 and rescued only when a streaming service picked it up, a small preview of the shift to come. The gatekeepers of the old model needed a diaspora story to appeal to everyone at once, in one country, in one time-slot; more often than not, they simply declined to make it. Streaming removed the gate.

The wave

Never Have I Ever, created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher, ran for four seasons and made a star of the Canadian-Tamil newcomer Maitreyi Ramakrishnan. It did not arrive alone. Indian Matchmaking (2020) turned the arranged marriage into a global reality-television talking point; The White Tiger (2021), adapted from Aravind Adiga's novel, earned an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay and a breakout role for Adarsh Gourav; Delhi Crime won the International Emmy for Best Drama Series. Diaspora and Indian stories that would once have struggled to reach a cinema now landed on the home screens of tens of millions at once.

Beyond the sitcom

And it was not only comedy. Streaming let the diaspora story spread across every genre. Delhi Crime brought prestige drama; Indian Matchmaking turned reality television into a worldwide debate about tradition and choice; The White Tiger delivered a savage class thriller. In Britain, Nida Manzoor's We Are Lady Parts found a Muslim all-female punk band, and the same platforms carried British Asian voices to audiences far beyond the UK. Where cinema had allowed the diaspora a handful of feature films a decade, streaming gave it a whole shelf — comedies and crime dramas and documentaries and coming-of-age stories, released to the world at once.

The argument as arrival

Not all of the reception was adoring, and that too was telling. Never Have I Ever drew as much criticism as praise from the diaspora — some viewers felt seen at last, others felt it leaned on clichés and caricature. But the argument itself was a kind of milestone. A community only gets to fight about how it is portrayed once it is being portrayed at all, and at enough scale that no single show has to carry the whole burden of representation. The diaspora had become a large enough audience to disagree with itself in public — which, after decades of taking whatever scraps were offered, is a luxury.

The everyday, not the event

The deepest change streaming brought was one of register. Cinema had tended to frame the diaspora around big dramatic set-pieces — the wedding, the funeral, the culture clash, the return to the motherland. The NRI film ran on spectacle; even the auteurs reached for the epic wound. Streaming, with its long seasons and low stakes, had room for the ordinary: the awkward crush, the parental guilt-trip, the specific comedy of a Hindu prayer room and an American prom existing in the same week of the same life. It let the diaspora be mundane on screen — and mundanity, the freedom to be unremarkable, was exactly what the caricature had always denied it.

The global living room

And the audience was no longer only American. A show like Never Have I Ever streamed the same day in Mumbai and Manchester and Melbourne, which meant the second-generation Indian in Toronto and the cousin in Chennai could watch the same story of a diaspora childhood and each recognise a piece of it. Streaming dissolved the old wall between the home-country audience and the diaspora audience: the story that once had to choose between the two now reached both at once, on the same night. For a scattered people, that simultaneity was its own kind of homecoming — the whole diaspora, and the homeland it left, gathered around the same screen, arguing about the same characters, at last watching themselves be ordinary together.

The creators in control

Behind the shift were diaspora creators who no longer waited to be cast. Mindy Kaling and Aziz Ansari, whose Master of None mined the second-generation experience for a Golden Globe and two Emmys, wrote and produced their own worlds; a generation of South Asian writers now staffs the rooms where these shows are made. Streaming did not just give the diaspora more roles. It handed it the pen — and the diaspora used it to write down the small, true, unspectacular details of its own life, which no one outside it had ever thought worth filming — and which, it turned out, plenty of people well beyond the diaspora wanted to watch.

Part 7 of The Diaspora Screen*. See also Part 4: Hollywood's Indians and Part 2: the diaspora auteurs.*