Jasmeet Raina questions the meaning of success in Season 2 of Late Bloomer

While making the second season of his dramedy Late Bloomer, Jasmeet Raina found himself in an unfamiliar position: the director's chair. 

Having created, starred in, and co-written the series, Raina also directed some episodes this season, something that had been an ambition of his for several years. 

"It's always been a passion," he says. "I wanted to go to film school to direct, but it never panned out.

Late Bloomer follows YouTuber Jasmeet Dutta, It's a story that's loosely based on Raina's own career as an early 2010s YouTube sensation. He says that while he was technically directing during his YouTube days, directing episodic television is a much different process

"[On YouTube] it was five or 10 people, now it's like literally 150 people who need to know exactly what they're doing," he says, adding that the biggest challenge has been learning how to translate the vision that exists in his brain to the rest of the team.

"I know what I want in my head, and then I have to relay that information to everybody else that's involved when it comes to like sound , where the camera being set up, where's the grip going? Lighting. All this stuff," he says.

Season 2 sees the protagonist leave his parents' house, trading it in for a hovel-like basement apartment he shares with a seemingly ever-growing number of Indian international students. Raina says the storyline gave him a chance to explore what he sees as the tension between Canadian Punjabis like him and more recent arrivals. 

"I wanted to show that dynamic and the privilege my character has," he says. "At the beginning of the episode, I'm listing all these problems, and one of the students is like 'Why don't you go back home?' Because, like, they don't really have that option."

It's a subject he explores further in a capsule episode later on in the season, which moves away from his character and focuses on one of the other residents of the basement apartment, a character he describes as "trying to do everything right, but everything keeps going wrong for him." Raina says he wanted to draw attention to a virulent strain of anti-South Asian racism he's seen pop up in the last few years, one that's particularly focused on international students and other recent arrivals who he says are often used as scapegoats for everything from the housing crisis to street crime.

He adds that he spent the summer talking to international students and temporary foreign workers working in food delivery in order to better flesh out the character. 

"While I was writing this episode, I would pull over random Uber Eats drivers, or if there was any that recognized me, I'd just try to strike up a conversation with them… and be like, 'Yo, tell me about your experience. How was it… coming from Punjab or coming from India and now you're here? What's your family situation like? What's your dating situation like? How are you making things work?' And so I was able to hear a bunch of different stories."

While  Raina was a hit on YouTube, his onscreen alter-ego, Dutta, finds himself caught in an odd trap of online fame: he's too successful at this to feasibly work a real job, but not yet successful enough that online videos are a full-time living. It's a situation that leads him to question his choices.

"He's kind of in this weird middle place where he doesn't really know where he's going, but he's just like 'I think I have to do this. I just think I have to keep pushing,'" says Raina.

Raina says that one of his "personal philosophies" that's crept into the show is to question what it means to be successful.

"Society in general places emphasis on success and just money and being successful at [any] cost, like, whatever you gotta do to get there," he says. "That's the most amount of value we place on a person."

But having experienced some pretty impressive success as a YouTuber, and then having stepped back from it for five years prior to starting work on Late Bloomer, Raina says that success and acclaim aren't necessarily all they're cracked up to be.

"I experienced this huge amounts of success, but there were like certain parts of me that I felt were still stuck in, like, my late teens and early 20s," he says."That's why I took that time away."

He adds that ultimately, "making it" and material success are meaningless if it comes at the expense of being a good, empathetic person who knows themselves, and that the most important thing is "striving to help each other out, because we're all kind of in this together."

Late Bloomer is streaming now on Crave.