Bravo’s ‘Family Karma’ is an addictive and too real reality show

I lost my whole damn mind watching Bravo’s Family Karma.

I clock my first cringe of episode 1 at approximately 30 seconds in, when Brian refuses to put his phone away during an interview so he can text on it and find a wife (90 percent of my responses came from Brian, but we’ll get to that). The first two episodes had my shouting in expletive-laden Hindi at my desk and swiftly destroyed any resolutions to not touch my face as I clutched at it in excitement, agony, and frustration. 

But I expected this reaction, because I knew exactly what the show would be: classic Bravo reality chum, focused on wealthy Indian families in Miami in order to ensure that I would take the bait. And I sure did.

“There weren’t any aunties in Sex and the City.”

Most of the show’s cast are attractive young professionals living at home with their parents, either out of financial necessity or familial loyalty (sometimes both) and quietly, incrementally losing their sanity as a result. Their parents’ generation moved to Florida from India and their kids grew up friends as a result. “They had arranged marriages, we had arranged friendships,” one of them says early in the first episode.

The families of Karma are provide something we’ve never seen on TV before, which is multiple families with varied interpretations of what it means to be Indian, and to perform and preserve that culture. 

There’s Anisha’s family, with open conversations about grey pubic hair and menopause; there’s Brian’s mother, performing a religious ceremony for their new car; there’s the lasting arranged marriage of Vishal’s parents; there’s Monica and her single dad aka her best friend. Straddling the generation gap is single mom and divorcée Bali, who hangs out with the kids and parents alike. 

That complexity doesn’t stop Bravo from packaging Family Karma in bright colors and dizzying designs, having the characters deliver their talking heads in front of statues of a rotation of Hindu gods to give the non-Indian audience sufficient aesthetic cues that scream “THIS IS INDIAN.” In the background is a steady string of nondescript Indian-sounding music, which is what Hollywood provides in place of actual Bollywood songs due to complicated copyrights (no way in hell were Monica and Brian jamming to that on the way to a Diwali gala when “Aankh Maare” exists in the world). 

Though the parents aren’t the show’s focal point (yet — gimme an aunties-only shit-talk-over-chai session soon or bust), they’re ever-present, more often than not talking their kids’ ears off about marriage.

Ah yes, marriage. You may have heard tell of the South Asian obsession with weddings and children, but on Family Karma it rears its head as the ubiquitous plague that it is. It’s the talk of the town, whether with single entrepreneur Anisha, the long-engaged Vishal and Richa, the actively searching Brian, or even Amrit and the long-distance boyfriend his parents now accept and ask about.

Part of that is the parental pressure, but Family Karma reveals how much the culture of coupling wires itself into a supposedly more progressive generation of first- and second-generation Indians. Anisha may not want to discuss it with her nuclear family, but she does want to settle down with a long-term partner. Vishal is consumed by stress about his two-year engagement and difficult future mother-in-law, and the entire group corners Brian and Monica like vultures to ask why they aren’t dating when the hive mind has decided they should be.   

Which brings us to Brian — dumb, handsome, romantic Brian — who is my absolute nightmare. He’s a self-admitted reformed party boy, now ready to put those years in the rearview and find a good wholesome wife. To Brian, and to the many boys like him that I’ve met, wholesome means Indian. He’s known Monica since middle school, had multiple opportunities to respond to her previous interest in him, but as he himself says “I wasn’t really trying to do that back then.” 

But now he’s trying to do that, and she’s supposed to respond joyfully to acknowledgement that’s years overdue. It’s a damaging cycle perpetuated, as Monica inadvertently points out, by Bollywood films, where the male hero regularly sows his wild oats until his interest is suddenly piqued by a wholesome Indian girl back home who may or may not have carried a torch for him this whole time.

I’ve seen the they’re-friends-but-are-they-really trope on TV often enough to not be triggered by it, but seeing a melanin-dosed version made it that much more personal. I’ve been every person in the Monica/Brian situation: the friend who wants more, the friend who’s happy the way things are, the person who wants everyone to shut up, the people on the outside who can’t stop watching and won’t shut up. I am, quite frankly, terrified of how it will unfold. And I can’t look away.

With that said, though, Monica and Brian’s relationship is perhaps the least interesting thing about Family Karma. (I have long since ceased to care about the romantic goings-on of straight people.) I am significantly more interested in the inevitable combustion between Vishal and Richa’s parents (over one comment! From years ago!), Amrit’s long-distance relationship, and meeting Bali’s Olympic weightlifter boyfriend. 

One thing I couldn’t contend with was the shockingly apparent and deeply internalized self-loathing of Brian’s American dad and his disdain of all things Indian. He is the only person on the show who makes scornful jokes about Indians stereotypically being doctors and lawyers, about arranged marriage, about the name Fakir and how non-Indians can make fun of it. He beats us to the punchline, and I strongly suspect it’s because he’s been beaten to it many times before, with lasting damage.

Family Karma does not feel any more or less dramatic than the average reality show, but as an Indian American viewer, it is an out-of-body experience because of its similarities with my own life and social circle. When characters look like you, every TV show is a funhouse mirror version of your life. Not for the first time in 2020, I am floored by this revelation. I found myself wondering how the same scenes would play out with people I know, and by the end of episode 2 I was practically salivating for a franchise.

Family Karma airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Bravo. The first full episode is available on YouTube.