Universal experiences
Ladies, it is OK to feel bad.
AMERICAN comedy has witnessed quite a few South Asian success stories in recent years, from series such as Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project (2012 to 2017) to Aziz Ansari’s Master Of
None (2015 to present) to Hasan Minhaj’s stand-up special
Homecoming King (2017). Now, there is a new television comedy, I Feel Bad, in which lead actress Sarayu Blue and creator Aseem Batra are Indian-American.
But like The Mindy Project ,the show focuses less on the ethnicity of its protagonist, Emet (Blue), and more on universal experiences – in this case, the perfectionism that makes her constantly feel bad for not being a better wife, mother, daughter and career woman.
Batra explains that the name of the show is tongue-in-cheek, so Emet will not feel bad about everything.
“It’s complicated. Sometimes, she feels bad and, sometimes, she doesn’t feel bad. I think that’s part of being an empowered woman.
“It’s, like, ‘I guess I don’t feel bad that, right now, I want to take care of myself before my kids’.
“We are trying to empower her by letting her feel things that, on a lot of television shows, women don’t get to,” says Batra, who was a producer on medical comedy
Scrubs from 2006 to 2009. Comedienne Amy Poehler, whose production company is behind the series, says this will get at a truth about when women try to “have it all”.
“This is a lens with which to tell a working woman’s story that I haven’t quite seen before, which is this idea that whenever we’re ‘doing it all’, there are about two or three things on that list that we feel like we’re giving 10% to,” says the 47-year-old Parks And
Recreation (2009 to 2015) star.
It is also a show about the trials and errors of parenting, adds Poehler, who has two sons, aged 10 and eight, with ex-husband and actor Will Arnett, 48.
“It takes a human and real look at parenting. The characters played by Sarayu and Paul (Adelstein, who plays Emet’s husband) are a real team and what they share is the knowledge that they know little - that they’re in over their heads a lot of the time.
“I love watching that messiness because I think, too often, the women in television are supposed
to have all the answers, but they never get to ‘show their work’. So, there are a lot of big mistakes and big swings.”
Feeling bad is not unique to women, of course – the writers discovered this when they tapped their lives and those of the cast for story ideas.
“It’s such a rich thing and it’s not just women – guys have it, like, ‘I don’t work out enough’ or ‘I don’t make enough money’,” says Batra, who also drew from the humour book the show is based on, I Feel Bad: All Day. Every Day. About Everything by Orli
Auslander.
For Emet, adding to the pressures of life are the expectations of her Indian parents and it is here the show gets more culturally specific.
Batra and Blue, both 43, identified with this as the children of Indian immigrants, something they bonded over.
Batra says: “We have a shorthand because we understand where our parents were coming from as immigrants.
“So, when we do a scene in which there’s pressure on (Emet from her parents), she understands it – that our parents came here hoping we’d have an easier life in some ways and more opportunities.”
But Batra’s goal was to simply portray a family rather than specifically a mixed-heritage one (Emet’s husband is white).
“What I’m excited about is the normalisation of a family that looks like this.
“If we make room for all kinds of colour on television, then people can tell stories in different ways,” she says. – The Straits Times/Asia News Network IFeelBad airs every Monday at 9.30pm on Foxlife (Astro Ch 711).