Finding Little America in Austin

Say the word "immigrant" and a handful of images come to mind, many based in stereotypes both malign and obliviously benign. But in Apple TV+ anthology Little America series creators and executive producers Lee Eisenberg, Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani, a wider array of stories are told - including one in Austin.

Directed by Tinge Kirshnan and scripted by Gordon and Nanjiani, "The 9th Caller" refers to Sachini (Isuri Wijesundara), the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants, who takes her destiny into her own hands by entering a competition for a free car. The catch? She and all the competitors have to kiss the car, and the last one puckering gets the keys.

It seems like a not-so-subtle reference to how the American Dream expects people - especially immigrants - to humiliate and demean themselves a little bit. But any accusations of being too on-the-nose are swept away by the fact that this story, like all episodes of Little America, are based on real stories, and the real experiences of real immigrants to America.

The inspiration for the show actually came when Eisenberg was suffering from writer's block, and happened to watch an episode of Aziz Ansari's Master of None entitled "Parents." Eisenberg explained, "Rather than being about the main characters, it was about their parents, and you saw their immigrant stories and how they came to the country." For Master of None, this was a one-off, but it made Eisenberg wonder about all the other immigrant stories out there that never get told or heard, the ones that break the sometimes hidebound rhetoric about who or what an immigrant is, and what their lives are really like.

There was also a personal element to this. "My dad's Israeli," he said, "and I've heard all his stories about coming to the States, and the highs and lows, and I started thinking, could this be an anthology series, with each episode a different immigrant story."

Of course, these stories are all so unique that the best resource would be people who had lived them. So he reached out to Josh Berman at long-form journalism publication Epic Magazine who immediately proposed working on photo-essays. "So, over the next four to six months, all these stories started coming at us from their researchers, and we did outreach into the community centers, and friends of friends. We just started collecting these stories and they were beautiful and surprising, from the breadth of the United States, from the breadth of the world. ... These are not people we're pulling from the headlines. These are slice-of-life stories."

The stories quickly plotted out the diversity of immigrant stories: a Japanese woman starting a baseball league in Ohio; a Belarusian migrant looking for a lost love in New York; a gay Syrian refugee in Idaho. Some are big, some are small, and some just immediately leapt out as too fascinating and intriguing not to tell. "There's a chef who made camel on a stick to sell at the Minnesota state fair. it's like, 'Well, that feels big, and we haven't been to Minnesota yet, and we haven't done a cooking story.' And then you start talking to the subjects and digging under the surface. He broke ribs in the process of making his camel meat, but he kept going. What is that personality that does that?"

With these stories in hand, Eisenberg approached Master of None co-creator Alan Yang, as well as Gordon and Nanjiani, "and I just started putting together this dream team of really successful, incredible collaborators that I really wanted to work with."

Little America presents an opportunity to show American audiences the spectrum of immigrant experiences, the complexities and nuances, and to break down the idea of "immigrants as a monolith." Eisenberg explained, "When the show first launched, Trump was in office and the monolith was the immigrant crossing the border, going off to be a criminal and devastate our communities." Often, even in sympathetic portrayals, immigrants are restricted to cleaning houses or working behind the counter at a convenience store, "or they're the side characters to the main characters, who are often white."

Aside from centering these people in their own stories, those same stories also tackle questions of identity, of how much you can or want to hold on to the culture that you came from. Eisenberg recently spoke with with the real-life subject of "Camel on a Stick," who, after living in America for most of his life, feels American and Somali ("you can feel both things at the same time), but still deals with "these feelings of being a sell-out in your community. ... If you make the food so that it's approachable for Americans, are you doing a disservice to you community or are you letting people in."

Not that Little America is intended to be overtly political, he said, "but the very nature of making a show like this, it becomes political." However, at the end of the day it's always supposed to be entertaining. If they lead with the inherent message "then that feels like homework, and no one wants to do homework. People want to sit in front of the TV and feel something.

After all, where these people come from and where they end up is only one element of the series. Eisenberg stressed that their stories are, at the end of the day, universal, and will give audiences something to feel, and shared experiences with the people in the stories. "Everybody wants to fall in love. Everybody wants a better job. Everybody wants to reconcile with an estranged relative."

That's a major theme in "The 9th Caller." Beneath the quirkiness of kissing a car, it's really about Sachini's strained relationship with her father (Bernard White). "It's a story about a father and a daughter, and pressures, and how that manifests." It was a story that fitted well with Gordon, who was a therapist before she was a writer, and "because the character tapping into her own anxiety issues was something she was really able to tap into."

It also meant that there was an unlikely opportunity to include a full-blown Bollywood-style musical, and that was a high point for Eisenberg. He said, "Every time I see it, I love it."

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Little America seasons 1 and 2 and streaming now on Apple TV+