‘Deli Boys’ aims to flip the script on the stories of guys behind the counter

Principal Figgins and Babu Bhatt walk into a bar. Oops, sorry, scratch that — Iqbal Theba and Brian George walk into a restaurant. Theba and George are on Devon Avenue, Chicago’s bustling South Asian hub, and they’re in town to film “Deli Boys,” Hulu’s new action-packed “crimedy.”

On this show, Theba plays Pakistani patriarch Arshad “Baba” Dar, who runs DarCo, proprietor of the ABC Deli chain, and George plays Ahmad Uncle, Baba’s business partner and a formidable heel. Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh star as the two leads, Mir and Raj, respectively, Baba’s coddled sons, who eventually learn what their father really did for a living. Series creator Abdullah Saeed, along with Ali and Shaikh, brought Theba and George to Devon Avenue, where the cast would often wind up over slow-cooked nihari stew after a long day of shooting.

There’s something of a passing of the torch happening here. Babu is one of George’s best-known roles, though the actor isn’t Pakistani like the “Seinfeld” character. Saeed recalls that Babu must have been the first Pakistani character he saw in an American comedy show. And Theba, who is Pakistani, most notably appeared on “Glee” as Principal Figgins, as well as “Friends” (in its 100th episode) and “Seinfeld.” For Saeed, seeing Theba play a cool, rich dad and hearing George use his natural accent, rather than being shoehorned into diminutive roles or changing their voices, was loaded with meaning. Baba and Ahmad are meaty, three-dimensional characters, not relegated to cab driving or turban wearing.

“Hearing them speak about their experience on this show, on their last days, it was so moving, because you can tell that these guys just love this job,” Shaikh said. “And they have never gotten to do it the way that they always dreamed of doing.”

“Deli Boys” features several actors of South Asian descent including Poorna Jagannathan, left, Asif Ali, Saagar Shaikh and Brian George.

(James Washington / Disney)

“Deli Boys,” premiering Thursday, is here to remedy how South Asians are depicted, but not in a way that feels forced. Saeed says he wasn’t trying too hard with the representation angle; he just built the framework for a crazy caper and placed a Pakistani American family within it. When Baba dies suddenly after being hit by a golf ball, the FBI makes it apparent that the family fortune does not, in fact, lie in the ABC Deli chain. Rather, as we find out from Lucky Auntie (a sizzling Poorna Jagannathan), the real money is in the achaar. No, like, in the achaar. Turns out, Baba and Co. have been smuggling bricks of cocaine inside the pungent mango pickle containers.

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In conversation — over video call from Disney headquarters in Burbank — Saeed, Shaikh and Ali have an effusive chemistry — not unlike the consistency of a jammy achaar. They finish each other’s sentences, and crack jokes constantly.

“It was unapologetically just, like, we’re not trying to explain anything,” Shaikh said. “We are just making —”

“Existing,” Asif added.

“We’re making our thing,” Shaikh continued. “It’s not on-the-nose or heavy-handed or trying to explain anything. We’re just some cool guys being cool guys. That’s it.” In other words: “You cannot orchestrate authenticity.”

“In every element, this show DGAFs,” Saeed continued. “Because people are used to idealized minorities on TV, they’re like, ‘Oh, why aren’t they perfect?’ Because they’re f—ing real. At every juncture, if somebody’s like, ‘Oh, but here’s this social rule or assumption that I made that this is breaking,’ I’m like, ‘We don’t give a f— about it.’”

Series creator Abdullah Saeed flanked by Saagar Shaik and Asif Ali. “At every juncture, if somebody’s like, ‘Oh, but here’s this social rule or assumption that I made that this is breaking,’ I’m like, ‘We don’t give a f— about it,” Saeed says.

(Bexx Francois)

That includes assumptions about where, exactly, the plot might go. Saeed, who developed the show with Jenni Konner (“Girls”), has said that his style of comedy is hard turns when you least expect them, a character moment sandwiched by a big plot turn and a joke. “Deli Boys” showrunner Michelle Nader just likes “hard comedy.” “I think that half-hour comedies have gone away from that since streaming,” she wrote in an email. “This show went for hard funny but not at the expense of a real plot and authentic characters, and that is the trifecta.”

There were already plenty of laugh-out-loud jokes in the script — penned by Nader, Saeed, Mehar Sethi, Sudi Green, Feraz Ozel, Kyle Lau, Nikki Kashani and Ekaterina Vladimirova — but once Shaikh and Ali were cast, they added their own zing. Mir, a high-strung anxious perfectionist, was written as more of the audience stand-in, the straight man. But Ali was a comedian before he was an actor, and brought that levity with him. Raj, on the other hand, is a party animal. But, like, a chill one. (“Die a Raj,” Ali quipped, “or live long enough to see yourself become a Mir.”) Originally, Saeed saw himself playing Raj and Shaikh as Mir, but that changed when Ali entered the frame. (“We’ll pay you after this,” Ali joked after Saeed sang the actors’ praises.)

There are two explanations for the two-brother setup: One, Saeed himself is one of “a pair of brown brothers.” He has a brother who is more than four years older and a half-brother who is 16 years younger, so he understands sibling dynamics well. And two, Raj and Mir are two sides of Saeed himself, manifestations of the push and pull of being a child of immigrants.

“Each brother is the extreme of two ways of thinking about stuff, and externalizing it with these two characters, it just allows us to put them in different situations, and then they exist as those extreme perspectives, and they clash with each other,” he said. “And the reason they can keep clashing with each other to an insane degree, is because — especially, I feel, with immigrant families and sibling relationships — there’s such a strong bond that you know is never going to break, so you’re not delicate with it.”

And there’s a B-side to Baba’s backstory, too. Immigrant parents often don’t tell us all of their stories — though they rarely involve a covert drug-smuggling ring. “They keep secrets from us because they think they’re protecting us, but actually we would be much better off if we just knew who they really were,” Saeed said. “And that would make us more whole. But they think they’re doing it for us. It’s actually hurting us, and it creates this distance.”

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1. Asif Ali: “Die a Raj or live long enough to see yourself become a Mir.” 2. Saagar Shaikh: “You cannot orchestrate authenticity.” 3. Abdullah Saeed: “Each brother is the extreme of two ways of thinking about stuff.” (Bexx Francois / For The Times)

But there’s also love there. Baba omitted the truth to protect his sons — their bewilderment also meant plausible deniability — and Lucky Auntie’s tough love shields the boys from any real fallout. “At its core it is a really sweet family story,” Konner said in an email. “And it’s only because of that emotional story that we are allowed to go so far with the gore, and the jokes, and the way people die.”

“Deli Boys” is all in the family, but, as the show’s tagline puts it, the family business is anything but convenient. This pun, and the ABC Delis, are a wry stab at the onscreen stereotype of a South Asian convenience store worker. Over the course of his career, Ali has played the guy at the gas station. “I was like, oh, man, this sucks, that this is the limitations of our representation in culture,” he said. “Because I know that I have people in my family that work in these situations, but they’re fully fleshed-out people that have families and have stories and have children and have responsibilities and pains and all that, but we never get to see that.”

But now, Ali said, they’re flipping the script.

Now, we get to see the whole life of the guy behind the deli counter, in all its hues — cocaine-dusted, blood-soaked, achaar-stained, sweat-drenched. This hits close to home: Saeed and Shaikh have both worked those counters. (Shaikh says he smoked behind his, in a rebellious teenage/college phase — a true Raj.) And Shaikh’s dad and brother have fought to keep the family gas station running. It’s the family business. It’s something to be proud of. It’s a legacy.

So is this show: “This was the job of my life, and I feel like no other job is going to feel as important to me as this one,” Shaikh said. “And all I want to do is come back to this every time.”

“We made something that pushes us forward in a direction that I think we should be going in, of exploration, of expanding the bounds of what people that look like us can be in,” Ali added. “We don’t have to be in things that are simply thesis statements about us as people. … To me, that’s really the real achievement here: to actually make something that feels genuinely new.”