Comedian, actor, writer and director Jasmeet Raina’s TV series Late Bloomer is a funny, affecting show loosely based on his life as a first-generation Punjabi Canadian immigrant.
Photo by Christos Kalohoridis, courtesy Nera.
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Jasmeet Raina’s efforts to shine a light on the realities of Punjabi Canadian life have struck a nerve with audiences.
Jeevan Sangha 5 Jun 2026 The Tyee
Jeevan Sangha is a freelance culture writer and senior editor at Shado Magazine. She was the 2024 Tyee Hummingbird Fellow.
At a time when racism against South Asian people is on the rise in Canada , Jasmeet Raina’s creative output feels like a breath of fresh air. The 36-year-old comedian and actor grew up in a Punjabi Kashmiri Sikh family in Guelph, Ontario, and his hit TV series Late Bloomer started its third season on Crave this spring. Imbued with humanity, generosity and humour, the show offers an incisive look at immigration, racism, intergenerational trauma and coming of age.
Late Bloomer is a comedy series loosely based on Raina’s life as a millennial comedian and content creator navigating life with a foot in many worlds — his family, his friends, his professional life. After the series premiered in 2024, Raina was named a Canadian to watch in View the Vibe magazine’s Power 60 list . And the show picked up three prizes at the Canadian Screen Awards. In 2025, Late Bloomer won for best comedy program or series and achievement in casting, and again for best comedy series in 2026.
Where some mainstream South Asian media offers reductive tropes like the caricature of a strict parent with little insight on their child’s inner life, Late Bloomer approaches its subject matter with freshness, dimension and depth.
The show gives us a world of fully realized characters. There are Jasmeet’s frustrating yet loving parents Supinder and Gurdeep who struggle to understand their son, and his strict and unforgiving grandmother who comes to visit indefinitely. Meanwhile his sister Maanvi is navigating pressure to marry, and his endearing group of friends each, in their own ways, feel like late bloomers themselves.
This world is charmingly familiar and even therapeutic to watch onscreen.
Dadi, played by actor Usha Kiran Uppal, right, critiques Supinder’s cooking in the TV series Late Bloomer . Supinder is played by Sandeep Bali.
Image by Brendan Adam-Zwelling.
Art imitates life
The third season of Late Bloomer finds Raina’s character, Jasmeet Dutta, hosting the biggest bhangra competition in North America. Onstage, Jasmeet offers a playful if somewhat tropey set. He knows exactly what jokes to tell for the crowd, though the material doesn’t feel particularly compelling to him as a comedian.
“I just feel like I’m on autopilot at these things,” Jasmeet tells his friend over the phone later that night when she asks how it went. When she encourages him to experiment with new crowds and new materials, he’s resistant. “What else am I supposed to do?” he replies.
It’s an internal struggle with which Raina, as a writer and comedian, is all too familiar. Conversations like the one between Jasmeet and his friend in the show are drawn from real experiences, Raina told The Tyee.
Before Late Bloomer , he was an in-demand YouTuber who was often called upon to host Punjabi competitions and festivals himself. He would accept these gigs while grappling with a perpetual desire to do work that felt bigger and more aligned with his voice.
Known then as Jus Reign , Raina amassed millions of views on YouTube in the 2010s with his satirical sketch-comedy skits that explored nuances of his life and experiences as a first-generation Punjabi Canadian. His videos resonated with the global Punjabi diaspora and beyond. They spoke to the specificities and quirks of our culture in a way that was otherwise difficult to find in mainstream media.
At the time, Raina felt intense pressure from the online world to be on even bigger stages than he already was on — to prove that his work had rapid and visible mobility towards white spaces.
“As a South Asian creator, you’re always compared to somebody else,” he said. “It was such crazy exposure therapy I went through, and I had to come to terms with the fact that I wanted to make art that is longer lasting, and more impactful than what I was doing.”
Jasmeet Raina checks out a shot on the set of the Season 3 opener of Late Bloomer .
Image by Brendan Adam-Zwelling.
Directing with an eye on cultural nuances
Now that Late Bloomer is well into its third season, Raina juggles several roles to execute a show that is layered, meaningful, complex and representative of the lived experiences of his community. In addition to starring in the show, Raina serves as executive producer, co-showrunner, writer and is deeply embedded in the editing process. It’s demanding, he says, but worth it.
This season also marks Raina stepping further into his role as a director. He directed four episodes this season.
“Di…
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