[ Little America wants to give its episodes extra meaning by
being based on truth, because, especially right now, it is
heartrending and lovely to see stories about American immigrants that
are based on real lives.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

WE’RE LUCKY TO HAVE LITTLE AMERICA  
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Kathryn VanArendonk
January 17, 2020
Vulture
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_  Little America wants to give its episodes extra meaning by being
based on truth, because, especially right now, it is heartrending and
lovely to see stories about American immigrants that are based on real
lives. _

, Photo: Apple TV+

 

Episodic anthology shows are a real mixed bag. For a while, I’ve
held a firm “anti” position, thanks to the treacly, smug patness
of _Modern Love, _the diminishing returns of _Black Mirror_, the
underwhelming _Twilight Zone _remake, and the overrestrictive
conceit of _Room 104, _which makes even its great episodes seem like
they’re filling in a worksheet. There are a few shows that really
test my distaste, though. There’s _Documentary Now_, which is more
than welcome to keep doing whatever its weird heart desires.
There’s _High Maintenance_, which makes surprise feel welcome
rather than obnoxious. And now there’s _Little America_, a show
which I was not prepared to love and then absolutely did.

The Apple TV+ streaming series presents a new kind of publicity
challenge for the outlet, whose previous releases all had big, buzzy
draws of some sort. _The Morning Show _is almost unsustainably large
in terms of both its star power and its budget. _Dickinson_, a much
smaller and less obvious title to hang a launch on, nevertheless had
the benefit of being _extremely _weird and beloved in niche corners.
Shows like _See _and _Servant _have an explicit genre appeal.
But _Little America_ is like its name: a very small show with
reasonably well-known producers (Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon)
but few big-name actors or directors attached to it. There are eight
half-hour episodes. Their scope is modest. The stories, which are
sometimes delightful and sometimes tragic, are about relatively
everyday lives. The show is _beautiful_.

Right out of the gate, _Little America _pulls an effective,
remarkable bait and switch. The first episode, “The Manager,”
tells the story of a boy named Kabir (played by Eshan Inamdar and
later by Suraj Sharma). His parents run a motel, but when it becomes
clear that their visas haven’t been extended and they could be
deported, they make the choice to go back to India, leaving
middle-school-aged Kabir in charge of the business. After Kabir’s
parents leave, it looks for a moment like “The Manager” is going
to be a certain kind of story about immigration and America. Kabir has
always loved words and spelling, and after he writes several letters
to the government that fail to create any motion on his parents’
case, Kabir decides to go to the National Spelling Bee. For Kabir, the
point is not to win. The point is that he’s heard finalists get to
have a face-to-face meeting with Laura Bush. Kabir hopes that if he
meets her, he can plead his case. He wins spelling bees. He goes to
the national event. He becomes a finalist. He meets Laura Bush, and he
stands up to read a letter about his parents and how he desperately
needs them to come back.

A lesser show would’ve made this the arc. It’d be so heartwarming
and easy to twist the story this way, to have Laura Bush clutch this
little kid in her arms and promise to make things right. It would
turn _Little America _into a show that looked like the “shining
city on a hill” rhetoric that has so rarely matched up with the
reality of the immigrant experience. That’s not the choice _Little
America _makes. Instead, Laura Bush does little to help Kabir, and
the end of “The Manager” is a fantastic wash of emotional nuance,
happy in some ways and devastating in others. It has no interest in
simplifying or sanitizing the mess of Kabir’s story, and rather than
trying to shape everything into a tidy package, it concludes with an
image that amplifies the pain and sorrow of it all, in spite of what
looks superficially like a happy ending.

Watching _Little America,_ I realized that my aversion to episodic
anthology shows doesn’t have to do with the form itself. It comes
from the fact that it’s really, really hard to create characters
wholesale, give them lived-in worlds, build an entire plot arc, and
find wells of emotional complexity in the space of a single episode.
I _love_ stand-alone episodes and episodic storytelling in other TV
series because they often capitalize on their own emotional complexity
by using all the characters and worlds a series has already built. But
few episodic anthologies have managed the trick of making entirely new
stories each episode while also ensuring the emotional reality lands
somewhere more complicated than “aww” or “oh no,
dystopia.” _Little America _is one of the few that really pulls it
off.

Each episode is entirely different — different casts, different
kinds of protagonists, with stories about immigrants from different
countries. But while _Little America_’s main connective theme is
“immigrant stories,” the deeper and more meaningful through line
is its refusal to bow to the simplicity of short truisms about its
subjects. They are “hard work pays off stories,” and they are
“immigration is hard” stories, yes. But each of them is also much
more lovely and painful and complicated than those easy summations.

My lone qualm, my single point of doubt about the whole series, comes
very briefly at the end of every episode. Each entry in _Little
America_ is based on a real story originally featured in Epic
magazine (owned by Vulture parent company Vox Media, which serves as
an executive producer of the series), and each episode ends with one
or two photographs and one or two lines about the real person who
inspired it. As Emily Yoshida wrote for Vulture
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this phenomenon, the real-life-photo-at-the-end thing is “the
cinematic equivalent of overachieving middle-schoolers waving their
completed homework at the teacher two days before it’s due, eager
and desperate to prove that they’ve done the work.”

“‘See, this all really happened!’” Yoshida imagines the
filmmakers saying. “‘See, we didn’t lie!’” That impulse is
definitely at play in _Little America_, that anxiety to prove that
these stories have meaning — have _extra _meaning — because they
are also real. But I’m more inclined to excuse it here. For one,
each episode is artfully made, so much so that the art of it makes the
real-life element feel more like a foundation than a
justification. _Little America _gets away with telling
belief-suspending stories because it tells them well, not because it
has the “but it really did happen!” certificate of authenticity.

The other reality is that this moment in political history gives real
immigration stories a different sort of power. _Little
America _wants to give its episodes extra meaning by being based on
truth, because, especially right now, it is heartrending and lovely to
see stories about American immigrants that are based on real lives. We
are lucky we have _Little America _here to do it.

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