If you’re looking for a South African comedy, in English with sprinklings of Zulu, about feuding neighbors whose hostilities escalate when their children fall in love you could do worse that “Meet the Khumalos.”

It’s so generic and derivative of so many movies from so many cultures that South African quiblers who complain about its similarity to an Indian South African comedy (“Keeping up with the Khandasamys”) should sample Hollywood’s “Meet the Parents” and any of the comedies imitating it, or which that Hollywood franchise borrowed from — movies spanning the screen comedy globe.

But while the joke-writing is tepid and the situations less than wholly original, “Khumalos” is the very meaning of the phrase Around the World with Netflix. It’s a genial, colorful dip into another culture in rom-com form.

Set and filmed in and around an upscale “estate” in Durban, it’s about an affluent family, the Khumalos, and how they react when their new neighbors are “moving on up” strivers who earned their way out of KwaMashu Township to more luxurious digs.

Husband Vusi (Bonga Dlamini) and his “traditional” mother Mavis (Connie Chiume) roll with it. But the preening, stylish Grace (Khanyi Mbau) is beside herself. A professional woman so overly coiffed and made up and pale that her mother-in-law refers to her as “that white woman,” Grace isn’t having this riffraff next door.

“They’re not RIGHT for the neighborhood,” she huffs. “Standards must be upheld!”

It turns out that self-made township tour entrepreneur Bongi Sithole (Ayanda Borotho) has “history” with the woman she calls “Gracious,” her old township name, when she isn’t calling her “witch” and “Satan.”

It also turns out that Bongi’s traditional, educated and socially conscious teen daughter Sphe (Khosi Ngema) has history with Grace’s college-bound son, Sizwe (Jesse Suntele), and not just from high school debate competitions. They’re in love.

That brings the two feuding mothers into a conspiracy to break them up — sabotaging a camping trip the kids are sneaking off for in a campground where the lions may or may not “sleep tonight,” trying to send him abroad to study in Ireland and bringing back old flames to tempt them out of this Montague and Capulet calamity they’re considering.

It’s all standard rom-com stuff — stalking parents, bickering moms, dads who bond over beer and the mountains of meat that Bongi’s Desmond (Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe) lures Vusi back to eating, which Grace doesn’t allow.

The mother-in-law has a side-hustle, her “traditional” beauty treatment that she’d love to market as “Mavis’s Miracle Mud.”

And the young folks mix it up with a goofy childhood beau who became a wannabe rapper and the church-obsessed bombshell Charlotte (Nandipa Khubone) who’d be more than happy to take Sizwe off Sphe’s hands.

The local color spices up the path to “True Love Will Find a Way.” The “history” the two women have is dusted with tragedy, the remnants of South Africa’s racist Apartheid past. And the urgency Bongi feels about preserving Sphe’s “virtue” is tied to her upcoming Umemulo ceremony. That’s beautifully and movingly acted-out in the third act.

With material this over-familiar, the best one could hope for is witty dialogue (not really), a sprinkling of physical comedy and pratfalls that pay off (sure) and an upbeat ending.

It’s the sampling of the culture — no novelty for South African audiences, but a revelation to international viewers — that makes this mixed-bag of a rom-com worth your time and the “Khumalos” worth meeting.

Rating: TV-14, sexual material

Cast: Ayanda Borotho, Khanyi Mbau, Khosi Ngema, Jesse Suntele, Siyabonga Melongisi Shibe,
Bonga Dlami, Connie Chiume and Nandipa Khubone

Credits: Directed by Jayen Moodley, scripted by Gillian Breslin and Wendy Gumede. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32