India’s Best TV Shows Have Emerged From Uncensored Streaming Platforms1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteSex scenes, queer culture and complex social themes thrive on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon in a way they’ve never been able to in Bollywood or television.
A few months ago there was a whisper through the brown girl network. I got texts, DMs, and Snapchats, and they all asked the same thing: have you seen Made in Heaven? Have you seen Four More Shots? In the South Asian diaspora, news travels quickly, and these shows—both on Amazon Prime—were the latest.
Made in Heaven, based off the trope of the complex Indian wedding in Delhi’s high society, deftly navigates patriarchy, homophobia, and the caste system with a tenor somewhere between Gossip Girl and HBO’s Divorce. Four More Shots, meanwhile, was described to me as a brown Sex and the City. But with gut-wrenching scenes of a mother separated from her kid, or a bisexual Punjabi woman having a behind-doors relationship with a movie star, it is far closer to the reality of a middle class Indian woman eking out an existence in Mumbai.
“These girls had to be real, had to bleed, had to have flaws and yet had to rise above it all to be their own little un-superheroes,” said Rangita Pritish Nandy, the showrunner and creator of Four More Shots, who also grew up in Mumbai. “Amazon let us tell their story honestly, without being prudish and puritanical.”
Photo credit: Still from Made In Heaven
