“What I want people to do is let go of those black-and-white questions because that’s part of the mainstream cultural view of us. I want to define myself by who the fuck I am, not by what white America thinks I should be.” Photo: James Washington/Disney

By the height of the mid-2010s think-piece boom, the South Asian diaspora was split into two camps: people sympathetic to stories of brown kids being bullied at school for their smelly bagged lunches, and people who saw these stories as indicative of a relatively privileged community intent on defining themselves by childhood racial slights. As the intensity of this debate has tapered off over time, it’s given way to hindsight. Today, the phrase “White kids made fun of my lunch” is less a referendum on this specific grievance than a shorthand for the way that era’s reductive identity politics flattened the varied cultural experiences of millions.

In Hulu’s new show Deli Boys, there’s a roundabout nod to this discourse that speaks to the show’s biggest triumph. The screwball comedy created by Abdullah Saeed centers on Raj Dar (Saagar Shaikh) and Mir Dar (Asif Ali), a pair of pampered Pakistani American brothers forced to take over a criminal family enterprise they’re unaware of until their baba’s (dad’s) sudden death. In episode three, the brothers, along with their late father’s business associates, Lucky Auntie (Poorna Jagannathan) and Ahmed Uncle (Brian George), are looking for a new front to distribute the cocaine they smuggle in pungent jars of achaar (South Asian pickles), so they take a meeting with an Indian restaurant chain to trick them into carrying their product. “Give it a taste,” says Mir, unscrewing the lid. “If your kid doesn’t get bullied by the white children in their class when they pull that out of their lunch box, it’s not Kaka-brand achaar!” In the world of Deli Boys, this is neither a reference to a racial slight nor a rebuke of its exaggeration; it’s simply a trope to be played with. As much as any show centering brown Muslim characters can, the show dodges any questions of identity politics that aren’t in service of jokes. How these characters define themselves ethnically is incidental to the violent, high-stakes crime world they’re thrust into.

For Saeed, this wasn’t an explicit goal when he conceived of Deli Boys but a byproduct of writing a show in his unique voice. A Pakistani American by way of Thailand, Saeed has worked as a musician, journalist, screenwriter, activist, and host. He was previously best known for hosting Viceland’s nonfiction series Bong Appétit about cannabis-infused food as well as writing and acting on HBO’s High Maintenance. He’s hard to categorize, and the same is true of the characters he writes. Beyond that, it was just a matter of dropping these characters into the world he’d imagined and letting their story lines unfold naturally from there. “They’re not forced,” he explains. “They’re not trying to justify their South Asian culture or rectify that culture with their American culture. That shit is boring.”

When did you first come up with the idea for Deli Boys? 

I spent three years at Searchlight writing this script that was a co-write — kind of a long, weird feature that wasn’t the best sample. So my manager at the time was like, “You should write something that’s just your voice.” That’s where Deli Boys came from. I put it together to externalize this conversation that goes on in the head of any child of immigrants, which is, like, How do I honor my parents? versus Let’s just enjoy the fact that we’re not in the old country anymore. And, obviously, I think we’re all somewhere between those two types of reasoning. But these two boys in the show kind of start out on either extreme, and they create that platform for jokes.

What was the process like of pitching the show out to networks and streamers?

It was a long process. The only producer who wanted to produce it — despite many producers having read and liked it — was Jenni Konner, and she was in an overall deal at what was then Fox 21. We put together a pitch and then it got picked up by Fox 21, the studio. But we still needed to create a pitch in concert with them and pitch it out to networks. What slowed that process down was the reshuffling within Disney’s TV studios: Fox 21 became Touchstone Television, which then became 20th Television. Then when we were finally ready to take it out to buyers, everyone passed on it — Netflix, Hulu, FX, and Peacock — and no one else wanted to hear the pitch.

When I was preparing to get back out there to try to find writers’ room work, the producers were like, “There’s one more place that will hear the pitch, and that’s Onyx Collective.” This was in 2022. And so we did the pitch; I was kind of like, Fuck it, because I didn’t think they would buy it, so I felt like there was no pressure on me. And they bought it! I’m used to things falling apart when you least expect them and having to say good-bye to your darlings, so it was a nice surprise. There were a lot of steps and a lot of delays: the pandemic, the strike, all of those things. At every step, this show really faced an uphill battle.

What kind of feedback were you getting from the networks that passed?

Some places were like, “We’re developing something else that’s too similar.” And what they meant was anything that had a South Asian or a Muslim in it. Most executives are still white, you know? They’re not totally going to understand that there’s a lot of nuance within South Asian or Muslim representation. I can’t remember which place, but I feel like one of the places was like, “We’re doing Homeland Elegies, so that’s too close to this.” And I was like, What? It’s not at all! But we’re both Pakistani, so, I guess, fuck me. 

It’s not often that a script like this comes along with so many three-dimensional parts for South Asian actors. Given that, did you feel like you were spoiled for choice when it came to casting?

We went really wide with our casting because I always pushed for us to have Pakistanis in these roles. Of course, that’s difficult, because not everyone understands the differences. It’s a lot easier to just cast Indian actors to play Pakistani characters because there’s a lot more available. So we saw a billion tapes. My wife is an actor; she watched a lot of this stuff with me and had a better read on it. She was like, “Everyone here is clearly putting their heart into this so much.” Honestly, the feeling I got was I wish I could cast all of you. I genuinely want all these people who have passion for what I’m doing to take part in it. But you can’t. So me, the other EPs, and everyone involved picked the two guys who were the best. And they were so much better than any of us could have imagined.

Writers seem to hate it when their stories are flattened into conversations about representation. How consciously were you trying to prevent that from happening when writing the show?

The reason I didn’t feel the pressure to do it from the pilot was because it was on spec. I was like, I just need to convey my voice. It’s not something that I need to actually imagine on TV. So I was just being myself, and my characters are just being themselves. I think that also comes naturally because, to me, the heart of everything is the joke. I’m more focused on that, and other than that, I’m just letting the characters exist. And that’s where their emotional stories come in. They’re not forced. They’re not trying to please their parents. They’re not trying to justify their South Asian culture or rectify that culture with their American culture. That shit is boring.

It seems like they’re just able to pull from their Pakistani culture and American culture à la carte. There’s this scene in the pilot after their dad dies where Raj and Mir are in the mosque and they don’t know how to pray, but there are other scenes where Raj is wearing a chain with an Allah pendant. 

There’s a lot of Muslims that identify as Muslim, but they’re not walking around thinking about it all day; they’re just being. I consider myself a Muslim. I don’t practice diligently, and someone else might say, “You’re not Muslim,” but fuck that guy! I am a Muslim. This is my identity. There’s over a billion of us. We don’t just fall into these simple categories. Really what I want people to do is let go of those black-and-white questions because that’s part of the mainstream cultural view of us. I want to define myself by who the fuck I am, not by what white America thinks I should be.

In a lot of shows centering South Asian characters, the characters become these one-dimensional vessels to either support the model-minority narrative or reject the model-minority narrative. Did you think about where these characters lie on that spectrum, if at all?

I think they all reject it. Baba, for example, is a bombastic businessman, and bombast is a quality usually reserved exclusively for white businessmen. We’re not going to succeed if people are like, “This dark-skinned person’s being too wild.” But he doesn’t give a fuck, right? His American Dream was having lots of money and wearing pinstripes and his sons being petulant, spoiled kids, and he has achieved that. He’s not trying to appease anyone else.

Then, of course, there’s Raj and Mir, who just exist the way they are and do things that many people would consider unseemly or immoral. But as Michelle Nader, our showrunner, has always said, “Criminals don’t think that they’re criminals!” They’re just trying to do the best with what’s in front of them. A big part of the show is that they don’t have to be model minorities. Because why should any of us?

The joke it makes me think of in the show is when Raj is arguing with Ahmed Uncle about partition. Ahmed Uncle makes the assumption that Raj’s grandmother died during partition, and Raj replies, “Joke’s on you, man! Dadi died in America from nursing-home neglect!” The idea of putting your grandmother in a nursing home is so taboo in South Asian culture, but these characters are not beholden to being in that box. 

Yes, exactly. Those values are very American. The idea that you would pay someone to take care of your parent rather than take care of your parent yourself is just built into the way the American Dream functions. When we talk about “Dadi,” that’s obviously Baba’s mom. He was like, I’m working my ass off like an American does to achieve the American Dream, so I don’t have the American time to take care of my mom, so I’m gonna put her in a nursing home. Again, that could be about assimilation, but it could also just be a funny thing where Raj is like, “Touché, my grandma died in this much worse way!” For me, the money there is the joke.

Money is an interesting theme because there are a lot of South Asian Americans in this generation, like Raj and Mir, whose parents have done so well that it insulates them from any meaningful sort of class or identity solidarity. There’s this line in the pilot that made me laugh, where Raj says, “It’s up to us to enjoy this life for everyone who looks like us but doesn’t have it.”

It’s interesting because survivor’s guilt is very real for immigrant kids. But the thing is guilt is an entirely wasted emotion. Us sitting here feeling guilty about people who share our heritage but are starving or suffering somewhere — what does that do for them? Maybe it’ll drive us to action and we’ll volunteer or donate, but how much guilt do we feel versus how much do we actually do those things? I actually can kind of see Raj’s point of view, where he’s like, I bet you there’s more people who would see me and say, “You go, brother. We’re all eating shit, but at least you can live that life for us.”

It is funny to position living privileged and carefree as activism, though. 

I think Raj is a pseudo-activist in a lot of ways! He’s very privileged, but he holds all these woo-woo views, and he’s afforded the privilege to be woo-woo by ill-gotten money, which is so American. It’s like an investment banker who goes to mindfulness retreats.

Earlier you brought up your wife, Alexandra Ruddy, who plays Agent Mercer on the show. What was it like to be able to cast her in something you created?

It was an absolute dream. Every writer has a driving force inside them, and increasingly over time, mine is to impress my wife. In a lot of ways, the greatest joy for me was being able to write a role for my wife, and for her to shine in that role and be excellent and be hilarious, and for that to show the world that she’s an excellent comedic actress. And she’s so hot. I can’t believe that she married me.

Her boss, Tim Baltz’s character Director Simpson, is a bit of an idiot. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about how to portray cops on TV and not perpetuate “copaganda.” Is that something you were thinking about when conceptualizing his character?

Absolutely. There is a pretty storied contention between Muslim Americans and the FBI, so we’re definitely in that sandbox. Through those stories of Muslim surveillance, we’ve heard about the ham-fisted undercover operations and the internal corruption of these agencies that leads to pretty embarrassing outcomes that end up in This American Life stories. And then everyone’s like, “Oh, the FBI is a bunch of idiots!”

I’m sure that does not account for the preponderance of FBI agents, but the way that we’re looking at them is when you design a department to find criminals, they’ll find criminals, whether there are criminals or not. And here, of course, they’re actually on the scent, right? Agent Mercer actually has excellent instincts, because she knows something is going on despite how well hidden it is. And Agent Simpson starts out being all ego, but I think, over time, he sees the gumption in this younger agent that is maybe something that he lost in himself, and it excites him enough to actually start to break rules. The fact that she got to do scenes with Tim Baltz was amazing, because he is easily the most seasoned comedic actor we had on the show. And then, of course, the two of them got to do scenes with Chris Elliott in our finale. Chris Elliott plays a character who I’m very proud of called Sergeant Angelo Testicola. He’s a Philly PD cop who has an inferiority complex about the FBI.

How did the opportunity to cast Tan France in his first acting role come about? 

Man, that was really magical. After they had read the scripts for the first half of the season, Saagar, Asif, and Poorna were really trying hard to think of cool South Asians who could slide into some of the roles that we had in Deli Boys. And Poorna is good friends with Tan. Initially, they were like, “Maybe Tan can be Murderwala in episode three?” And then Tan worked with Jenni and Michelle over Zoom, just workshopping stuff and testing out his acting; they came out of that saying, “This guy can really act, and, in fact, after he’s in this show, people are going to think of him as an actor.” We had this role written by Feraz Ozel for a British Pakistani gangster, and it all just fell right into place. Tan had the perfect accent for it and then when we saw him be a scary hard-ass, it was an incredible revelation. I’m very proud we got to reveal that to the world.

You’ve done a lot of work in the cannabis and drug-decriminalization space. Did that background influence how you thought about depicting drugs and drug use in the show?

Absolutely, man. I honestly feel like the incidental representation of drugs in Deli Boys is kind of like a culmination of my career in some ways because I did some very on-the-nose pro-cannabis work, but the world has changed. I think the most important thing I want brown people to remember when we think about cannabis: This is our heritage. Cannabis is in the Ayurveda. Cannabis is in our historical, cultural pharmacopeia. That there’s South Asians who don’t know that we have a deep connection with this plant and think that it’s poisonous is just a testament to the success of colonialism. And I think that breaking out of that mind-set is incredibly important. The lines that we draw between drugs, food, and medicine are entirely arbitrary and culturally drawn, and we all adhere to the western standard of those delineations. And we don’t have to! This is a way in which Raj is very real. I truly feel this stuff. I do believe that we’re crazy to keep ourselves from the natural plant teachers. And, yes, I use phrases like “plant teachers!”