Quantico, starring Priyanka Chopra premiered on Indian television a week after its American debut. There are a number of firsts that have happened with the series. Not only is it an impressive jump from Bollywood to leading an all-American cast on an all-American prime time television show, it has also generated so much curiosity that Chopra's is a suddenly familiar face outside India.
The parallels with Shilpa Shetty are irresistible. When Shetty entered the Celebrity Big Brother (2007) house in the UK, she became a champion, a cause celebre for the "brown" representation of actors in international shows. Luckily for her – or was it scripted that way? – what appeared to be intense racism worked in her favour. She returned to India with an international exposure that gave her the kind of success her entire film career hadn’t till then.
Germaine Greer wrote about Shetty on the show, "Everything about her is infuriating: her haughty way of stalking about, her indomitable self-confidence, her chandelier earrings, her leaping eyebrows, her mirthless smile, her putty nose and her eternal bray, 'Why does everyone hate me?' Not to mention the crying jags."
And when Shetty was announced the winner, her reaction was, "Are you kidding me?"
Shetty's ethnicity became her calling card. Not so for Chopra, though – that was not the criteria for selection, she said in an interview. "Interestingly, Quantico was written for an all-American girl, a white girl. So they tweaked the story. My ethnicity on the show is half Indian-half Caucasian. You know I went to school in America, I grew up there, and all the Indian characters that I saw on American shows are stereotypes and talk like Apu from The Simpsons, who I hate because growing up, everyone would ask me ‘How come you don’t talk like Apu?’. It used to piss me off. My basis with ABC was that I want to do an ethnically ambiguous part, and that’s the only way I would do it. I didn’t want to do a big fat Indian Punjabi family, that’s so expected from a Bollywood actress. I had clearly told them that if you want to treat me like an actress and not a ‘Bollywood’ jewel, where I am supposed to dance and do those things, then I am fine. Which is why the parts they chose for me and scripts I read were for characters that are ethnically ambiguous."
Chopra's is, so far, the most definitive step yet by an Indian in American television. Earlier, Anil Kapoor has appeared in 24; Nimrat Kaur in Homeland; Anupam Kher in the sci-fi Sense8; and Rahul Khanna in The Americans. They played minor parts, mostly stereotyped not by accent but by geography.
Indian-origin actors living in the west have had a longer shelf life on American television: Sendhil Ramamurthy (Heroes), Archie Panjabi (The Good Wife), Kunal Nayyar (The Big Bang Theory) and Dev Patel (The Newsroom).