“The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh” with Naveen Andrews unfolds as a laugh-out-loud, half-hour funhouse as an Indian family relocates to, yes, Pittsburgh and is interrogated by American authorities two years after they’ve been living here.

Cultural collision meets comedic absurdity as the parents try to cope with an eldest son who’s gone mute, a flirtatious teenage daughter romancing her teen neighbor, and their precocious youngest who proudly declares his plan to be a garbage man so he can drive the truck.

The British Andrews, 55, had scored early in his career with the Oscar-winning “The English Patient” and the landmark “Lost” series. Here, he was won over by the originality of Michael Showalter’s script.

“He directed ‘The Dropout’ and having worked with Michael,’ that was the first thing, obviously, that made me want to look at the script,” Andrews said during a Zoom interview. “The fact that it was unpredictably anarchic, in a way that I hadn’t really seen before, attracted me. And then the form – the half-hour sitcom, which is the discipline I’ve never practiced before.”

Then there was the character of Mahesh, the sweetly befuddled patriarch. “I’ve never played a character who is it seems so relentlessly optimistic, almost irritatingly optimistic. Someone who doesn’t seem to have any…bitterness, someone who genuinely believes that he and his family will prevail in this foreign country by goodwill and love.

“I’ve never associated that with the immigrant resource at all. Growing up as I did in 1970s London, it was a lot darker. And our responses to hostility were very different. So this was all new territory for me.”

Mahesh has grand plans to begin a major business – only he needs bank approval on loans. His wife Sudha (Sindhu Vee) is a surgeon. She too has issues getting licensed to practice.

“I was able to empathize as well with my parents,” Andrews said. “My mother was an academic, a psychologist, who was educated in India and then at London University in England.

“But when they first came to England, even though they were graduates, both my parents had to work on the railway. This was in the 1960s and their degrees weren’t taken seriously at that time.

“So even though this is a different time in ‘Pradeeps,’ I had a lot of empathy for what my parents went through.”

A comedy that touches on social issues in mostly lighthearted ways is for Andrews, “A show about our natural curiosity about each other as human beings. As far as the Pradeeps are concerned, there’s no questioning of their identities and how they behave. It just is.”

All episodes of “The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh” stream on Prime Video Oct. 17