What to know
- Jasmeet Raina (Jus Reign) returns with season 3 of Late Bloomer, premiering April 24, where he serves as creator, writer, and lead actor, using the show as a more personal storytelling outlet than YouTube.
- The series explores South Asian identity in Canada, including racism and discrimination, drawing from Raina’s own experiences growing up Sikh in a predominantly white community.
- Storylines like the post-September 11 attacks, and the episode “New Canadian” highlights struggles of South Asian people in Canada, aiming to humanize immigrants amid rising online hate.
- Late Bloomer returns on Crave and Prime Video for Canadian audiences April 24.
A popular YouTuber is making headlines again as his Crave Original show is set to premiere its third season later this month.
Jasmeet Raina, who also goes by the pseudonym Jus Reign, is the creator, writer, executive producer and lead actor in his Crave original comedy series Late Bloomer.
The series has been renewed for a third season. Ahead of its premiere, Raina sat down with Now Toronto and opened up about some of the topics tackled in the series.
“Late Bloomer is like my therapy,” Raina said. “I’ve had these realisations about myself and my own growth and journey and all that stuff, and YouTube wasn’t the place to [talk about] it. So, Late Bloomer is that place where I got to experience this understanding or this awareness, and I love for people around me to be able to experience that as well, especially people in my community.”
Raina had his start on Youtube in 2010, where he often posted skits depicting stories reflecting his Sikh, Kashmiri-Punjabi family. Now, he’s transitioned over to creating, directing and acting in his Crave Original show.
The series continues on with the South Asian experience, often discussing themes of race, discrimination and hardships as a visibly Sikh person in Canada, something Raina experienced personally growing up in Guelph, which had a predominantly white population.
“Me and my brother were the only brown kids in our school, up until maybe high school and then 9/11 happened,” Raina explained. “That was a weird kind of experience, because the racism pre-9/11 was like Apu jokes [from The Simpsons]. It was like ‘Oh, thank you, come again!’ That kind of sh-t, it was playful, and then after 9/11, it was ‘terrorist,’ ‘Osama,’ and it was like ‘Oh, okay, the racism is different now.’”
Raina reflected a bit of this South Asian experience in season two, episode three “Not My Uncle,” where the characters of Jasmeet and Neal faced varying levels of racism following the fatal events of September 11, 2001.
“I kind of encapsulated as much as I could about my experience then,” Raina shared. “I feel like that’s when I became funny… I’m not gonna fight, I’m not gonna throw hands. It’s not my style. How do I deflect and diffuse racist situations? I just kind of had to use humour to make myself less threatening to people, because everyone immediately was like ‘this guy’s a threat…’ I just had to become likeable and funny and show people that I’m not a threat.”
‘New Canadian,’ why displaying the common international student was important as a response to Indian hate online
Raina displayed other South Asian experiences throughout the series, including one episode in season two, titled “New Canadian,” that acted as a standalone story of an international student navigating Canada.
He said the episode reflects on the real life story of multiple South Asian immigrants currently trying to make a living in the city. Raina said he interviewed different new Canadian food delivery workers, who told him of similar experiences they had with each other.
“I would just pull over random Uber Eats guys and just interview them and be like, ‘tell me your day to day,’ and so many of these guys have the same story,” he said. “Some of these guys had their bikes stolen, [had] not [been] able to get jobs, all these struggles that that student went through in that episode. I just found such a common thread with a lot of these guys, and so it was actually very easy to weave this story together.”
Raina said he included the story partially as a response to an increase of Indian hate commentary over social media.
“What the new immigrants are going through right now was like something similar to what my parents went through. So, I felt like it was also, in a way, an homage to my uncles and my parents and kind of the struggles that they went through, and now you’re seeing this new wave, this new generation of these guys that are my age or younger, and I see a lot of like that kind of same struggle, and I wanted to really paint a light on that,” Raina explained.
He added the “othering” of this demographic of immigrants was not something he stood for.
“I really wanted to humanise these guys that you see every day, kind of delivering bikes and you expect them to bring your food, and you expect all these things from them, but then you get to go online and treat them like sh-t and be like ‘get out of here, get out of this country,’” Raina explained. “They’re such an integral part of what makes this country, or is making this country great… I don’t see this kind of stuff being talked about on any big platform… I do feel a sense of responsibility, where I have this platform and I have this understanding of this community, and so I can create something that will help bring their story to light.”
Raina added that Siddharth Sharma, the actor who played the unnamed international student in Late Bloomer, was nominated for an ACTRA Toronto award for Outstanding Male Performance.
The show itself has also been nominated for awards of its own, including a recent Canadian Screen Award for Best Comedy Series.
At the end of the “New Canadian,” episode the character of The Student joined the storyline of another long-running character in the series. When asked if the character will be returning, Raina stayed mum.
“I don’t know, you’re going to have to watch.”
Late Bloomer will be returning to Canadians on Crave and Prime Video on Friday, April 24.
