The flashiest word in the title of Little America, the new anthology series from Apple TV+ based on the real life stories of eight immigrants, is “America”: its ideals, its promises, and how its subjects express or connect to them. But according to Lee Eisenberg, an Office alum who co-created the show alongside married Big Sick writers Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani, the “little” is just as important.
“I joke that the stakes aren’t, like, ‘The president’s daughter was kidnapped, what’s gonna happen next?’” Eisenberg says. “When you’re doing a story that takes place in an emergency room, the stakes are very high; they’re life and death. For the most part, with our episodes, that’s not the case at all. The stories are very personal, and the stakes are hopefully universal. ‘I want to provide a better home for my family’; ‘I want to fit in at a new school.’ Those kinds of themes and story lines are what we were chasing, and the fact that they were with people that are so rarely front and center was something that really excited us.”
With one exception, Little America sources its stories from the namesake nonfiction series by Epic Magazine, a hybrid publication and production company that simultaneously creates longform journalism and guides it through the Hollywood development process. (Epic cofounders Joshuah Bearman and Joshua Davis are writers themselves, and credited as executive producers on Little America.) In their original form, soon to be expanded and distributed as a stand-alone book, the narratives are first-person accounts of the infinite, idiosyncratic paths of assimilation. In the show, they’re transformed into stylized, dramatized vignettes: a rom-com set at a silent meditation retreat; a Horatio Alger story about a Ugandan woman selling cookies; a Chinese-American mother struggling to connect with her children on a cruise, based on episode writer-director Tze Chun’s own story.
Anthology series, which lack a consistent story or characters to tie their parts into a whole, can be tricky when they don’t have a strong enough sense of self. For every Black Mirror or High Maintenance, which explore technology and contemporary Brooklyn with a nimble curiosity, there are lesser examples like The Romanoffs or the third season of Fargo, which feel scattered in the absence of a cohesive, guiding vision. Little America fortunately falls into the former camp, with a topic—immigration—focused enough to anchor a show, but also broad enough to accommodate a dizzying array of styles and characters. “With an anthology series, you want every episode to feel distinct, and yet you want it to all feel of a piece,” Eisenberg acknowledges. “With something like this, we were really trying to create a mosaic or a tapestry of the United States. We wanted the episodes to really span the country; we wanted the episodes to have subjects from all over the world. Everyone is touched by or is an immigrant, and that informs what our country is.”
Who can settle in the United States, and how, is currently a charged topic in American national discourse, as it has been for centuries. Little America is clearly aware of its place within that dialogue, though it’s rarely overt in its messaging. “We didn’t want the show to be political, but we felt like the very existence of the show … is political,” Eisenberg says. Rather than stated outright, Little America’s ideals are instead found in a series of pointed decisions. Each of its first two episodes center on undocumented immigrants in the 2000s: Kabir, a 12-year-old who decides to compete in the National Spelling Bee when his parents are deported from Utah to India, and Marisol, a surly teenager who learns to channel her aggression through the traditionally white and affluent pastime of squash. Every half-hour chapter technically has a title (“The Rock,” “The Son”), but mostly identify themselves by their protagonist’s name, which flashes across the screen in large, unmissable font.
While offscreen headlines about immigration can be soul-crushingly bleak, Little America is generally upbeat. Kabir’s parents eventually return to the United States, where the family manages a motel; Marisol gains her citizenship and graduates college. “We didn’t want to tell story after story that is woe-is-me immigrant stories. That’s not the narrative at all,” Eisenberg explains. On the other hand, the producers also didn’t want a tone that was too relentlessly positive, even propagandistic. “We also didn’t want to make it seem like America is the answer,” Eisenberg says. “That’s too simplistic, and that was not the way we wanted to approach it.” Take “The Rock,” for example—cowritten by Eisenberg, Nanjiani, and Gordon—in which an Iranian transplant notes he had a full, fulfilling life in his country of origin. Little America aims for uplift without leaning too hard into ideas of American exceptionalism.
As with all anthology series, Little America varies in how often the show hits its self-assigned mark. At their best, episodes zoom in on everyday idiosyncrasies to reveal the broader truths beneath; my favorite installment, “The Cowboy,” follows a Nigerian college student who grew up on Westerns and uses cowboy culture as a gateway into the American South. It’s a low-key story without much high drama, but one that effectively illustrates the ties between two disparate cultures. “Regardless of what color someone’s skin is or what their ethnicity is, the stories that we were telling, we found that if you just took them down to their essence, they were very universal stories,” Eisenberg observes. “The culture or the person’s backstory was informing it and creating texture and giving it nuances, but that’s not what those stories were.” At times, however, the show can overplay its hand. Kabir’s episode ends on an ambivalent note, with his parents returning to a son who feels both ashamed of his own lack of progress and distant from them—only for a postscript to insert some forced positivity.
Each of Little America’s episodes ends with an update on and photographs of its inspiration, an increasingly popular device used in, among others, Nanjiani and Gordon’s The Big Sick, an adaptation of their own love story. Whatever its occasional stumbles, Little America can always fall back on its connection to flesh-and-blood human beings in all their quirks and complexities. Chun’s episode came about when he met with a producer about directing a chapter; in describing his connection to the material, Chun’s story about a family vacation was compelling enough that Eisenberg and his collaborators suggested he simply use it instead. Eisenberg also describes the emotional experience of showing the story of a Syrian immigrant’s relationship with religion, sexuality, and family to the man whose life it was based on: “He just said, ‘I’ve never seen a gay Muslim on TV represented this way.’”
Many of Little America’s contributors drew on their own personal experience, not just those of their subjects. Nanjiani grew up in Pakistan before moving to the United States for college; Eisenberg’s father is from Israel; Master of None fans are aware cocreator and Little America executive producer Alan Yang’s parents hail from Taiwan. (Little America also shares a music supervisor with Master of None in Zach Cowie, making the international-skewing soundtrack a highlight. “My Spotify just like, blew up in the best way possible,” Eisenberg says. “I guess I shouldn’t say I’m on Spotify; I’m kidding. My Apple Music!”) Writers, directors, and other production staff were also sought out for a firsthand connection to the show’s themes—Eisenberg estimates more than 80 percent of above-the-line crew were either the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves.
Last month, Apple ordered a second season of Little America before the first had even premiered. The tech company has renewed all its debut slate of series to date, but Little America still stands out as one of the most promising, more Dickinson than See. Between the book and the original project, there are plenty of Epic stories left to adapt, though the writers’ room has already started to look outward as it reconvenes this week. “The stories we’ve told in the first season span the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and aughts,” Eisenberg says. “We’re talking, this season, what is a story that takes place in the 1800s? Is there a story about Native Americans? Little America means lots of things, and I think it can really open up.”
There’s also the possibility, as with Chun’s episode, that Little America can borrow its plots from more unlikely sources. “There’s a story for Season 2 we might do that’s actually based on an Uber driver I had out in L.A.,” Eisenberg recounts. “It was about his first time living in New York. He lost his passport, and he had this crazy night where he had to go to the embassy to try and get a new passport, but the embassy was closed, he looked suspicious, and the cops pulled him over. I got him in touch with the Epic researchers, and they interviewed him, and now all of a sudden he’s one of the subjects in the book and we might end up doing his story. All that from an Uber to dinner!”
It’s a case of Little America’s process reflecting its core idea: that Americans can come from anywhere, and their stories can, too.