Netflix announced on Thursday that its show “Indian Matchmaking” will return later this year for a second season, noting that “the first season of the Emmy-nominated show, which premiered in July 2020, followed top Mumbai matchmaker Sima Taparia as she used traditional and modern matchmaking techniques on eight romantic hopefuls,” and “the second season will include some familiar faces and new singletons across the globe who have decided that it’s time to put their love lives in the hands of the expert.” The show has already been renewed for a third season, coming soon.
But the dating fest won’t stop there, the jovial Netflix announcement continued, “because we’re introducing Jewish Matchmaking, a new series from the producers of Indian Matchmaking that will feature singles in the US and Israel as they turn their dating life over to a top Jewish matchmaker.”
According to Netflix, “the new series, which doesn’t have a premiere date yet, asks: Will using the traditional practice of shidduch help them find their soulmate in today’s world?”
“Indian Matchmaking” is produced by Smriti Mundhra, an Indian-American filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her production company, Meralta Films, specializes in documentary films and non-fiction content. Mundhra won the Albert Maysles New Documentary Director Award at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival for her first feature documentary film “A Suitable Girl,” along with her co-director Sarita Khurana.
“A Suitable Girl” offers a unique look at arranged marriages, following three young women over four years as they each go through the process of finding a husband and coming to terms with the loss of independence that comes with an arranged marriage.
Co-director Khurana told Bustle in 2017: “Marriage in India is always romanticized, which is problematic. We wanted to question what a ‘suitable’ girl is at a time when not everyone wants to fit into that category even if they want to get married.”
Bustle’s Shannon Carlin explains that Khurana and Mundhara show in their documentary that the problems most people have with arranged marriage “aren’t necessarily specific to the way matrimony is handled in India, but a byproduct of a patriarchal system in which women are asked to make incredible sacrifices that men don’t have to make.”
It should be interesting to see how Mundhra, who has connected so well to the internal conflicts presented by the Indian matchmaking tradition, would handle the Shidduch tradition of Haredi society, and will she offer new insight that cuts through well-established cultural prejudices about arranged Jewish marriages.
