A Suitable Boy will soon be suitable for streaming in North America.
American streaming service Acorn TV has released a new trailer for A Suitable Boy, the Mira Nair–directed miniseries adaptation of Indian author Vikram Seth’s 1993 novel. Acorn will premiere the BBC Studio-produced series in the United States and Canada on Dec. 7.
The lengthy, sweeping novel is mainly set in Brahmpur, India, in the early 1950s, not long after India and Pakistan became independent nations. The story concentrates on the marriage prospects of Lata Mehra, an educated young woman from a wealthy family. As Kirkus’ review noted, “the story encompasses four well-off families, with a focus mostly on the younger members—poets, academics, playboys, newlyweds—who stitch a pattern of peccadillo through their elders' expectations.” Our reviewer wasn’t a fan of the novel, however: “lots of stuff obviously—at a marathon 1300-plus pages—but characters made out of cliché, with background-India the very stuffed pillow of local color that keeps them standing.”
Seth is an executive producer of the six-part miniseries, which stars relative newcomer Tanya Maniktala as Lata. Acclaimed Indian-American director Nair’s films Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Monsoon Wedding (2001) were nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, respectively, for Best Foreign Language Film. Welsh screenwriter Andrew Davies, who wrote the Kirkus-starred 1980 novel Conrad’s War, adapted Seth’s work for the miniseries; he co-wrote the movie versions of Helen Fielding’s bestsellers Bridget Jones’s Diary (1998) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2000).
The miniseries premiered on BBC One in the United Kingdom in July and streamed on Netflix in most of the rest of the world, except for North America and China. As the New York Times reported on Tuesday, the miniseries is currently at the center of a religious and political controversy in India. One scene in the miniseries, depicting a kiss between Muslim and Hindu characters in a Hindu temple, caused a member of the country’s Bharatiya Janata Party to file a complaint against two Netflix India executives. This, in turn, launched a police investigation into whether the pair intentionally set out to offend religious beliefs, which is against Indian law.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
