Riddhima Ghosh- Week 9: Primetimes

 Week 9: Primetimes

One of the most iconic parts of American pop culture is our reality TV shows. I think we all have heard of Desperate Housewives or American Housewife. Beneath all the drama, they are basically just giant exaggerations of what stereotypical American life in the suburbs is supposed to look like.

Desperate Housewives premiered in 2004 —well before any of us were even born— somehow became a legacy show that so many of us grew up watching years later. 

Or at least for me, this show was my childhood. Wisteria Lane is nothing but drama: pristine white picket fences and manicured lawns on the outside, but behind closed doors, there was no shortage of scandal. It perfectly displayed the “American Dream” as this glossy, secret-filled paradise.

Now fast-forwarding to American Housewife, which, in contrast, parodies this ideal perfection. Set in Westport, Connecticut, this show is all about the pressure to be the picture-perfect families from Desperate Housewives. The “scandals” depicted here are more realistic and occurrences that many of us might actually see on a day to day basis.

But if you walk into my house at 9 pm on any night, you won’t find any of those playing on our living room TV. You’ll find my mom completely locked into Anupama— an Indian drama that, if you’ve ever even seen five minutes of, is the most annoying thing anyone could choose to watch. It is centered around Anupama, a middle-aged Indian woman, who is very independently successful, and can solve every life crisis that comes her way simply because she is Anupama. What’s even more annoying is that the problems she faces are so dramatic that no one you know will ever actually have to deal with them. 

For years, (it has, unfortunately 2000+ episodes and ongoing) everyone in my family has found it to be extremely irritating too, but one day my dad told me the reason why she never misses an episode: she gets sucked up into Anupama’s world because she thinks she’s her. 

That line made me realize that even though my dad and I sit there complaining about the dramatic music, my mom is actually just living her best life from her living room couch. The show is her comfort space— a little piece of her home inside our house. It’s an unusual mix with me sitting in my room scrolling through clips of the American shows on my For You Page, but having two different TV worlds playing at once is the most authentic picture of my family’s American life, and probably many others’ too.


Image Source: imdb


Comments

  1. Naeva BhokareOctober 22, 2026 at 10:15 PM

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  2. Naeva BhokareOctober 22, 2026 at 10:16 PM

    Hi Riddhima, I hope you're having a great day! While I haven’t fully watched shows like American Housewife or Desperate Housewives, I do see snippets and clips of these shows on my for you page, often accompanied with gameplay footage on the bottom half of the screen. These shows seem jam packed with drama and information, and I always watch the videos all the way through. I think it’s so interesting how while you had what would be termed as American TV, your mom had the classic Indian serials. I remember watching the Indian serials with my grandparents in India, and the amount of dramatic music and flashes for the most mundane information was certainly attention-grabbing. It’s so great to see that moving to America and starting in a new country has not detached your mom from her version of American TV. I’ll definitely be recommending Anupama to my grandparents and hopefully the next time you and your dad sit on the couch to watch it, you’ll find a new Wisteria Lane or Westport to immerse yourself in!

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  3. Shon KhistiOctober 28, 2026 at 6:48 PM

    Hi Riddhima! I hope you are having a great day. I can not get enough of reality television. I find watching someone else's life and providing my own commentary as a way to escape the craziness of my own life. Zooming out from the sole picture of America, as you mention dramas from India, which do not worry my mom is also hooked onto. It is really cool how a conglomeration of ethnic reality television shows from K-dramas to telenovelas alludes to America being a "melting pot" even though it is through television. I feel like it is such an American tradition to sit around the TV and watch a movie or a show, that many immigrant families have inherited when making their transition into America. I found it interesting how you connected the depiction in reality shows to the American dream. To offer my own interpretation, I think reality shows falsify the American Dream presenting it as rich people with even richer problems when in reality a totality of the United States does not experience anything similar to those depicted in ironically called "reality" TV shows.

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