“Fresh Off the Boat” is a new show on ABC about an Asian-American family adjusting to the suburbs. The show is loosely based off restaurateur Eddie Huang’s memoir of the same name.
The show is funny and does a lot of things right. Main actors Randall Park (who recently starred as Kim Jong Un in “The Interview”), Constance Wu and Hudson Yang own their roles and allow the well-written humor to work. The comedy is cultural but the general audience will find no shortage of laughs — from showing the shock of going to an American grocery store for the first time to showing Eddie’s grandma (played by Lucille Soong) rolling in a wheelchair bumping Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I” on a boombox — the show ends with a “Modern Family”-esque resolution, but without most of the sappiness.
However, “Fresh Off the Boat” is not without its flaws. Despite good acting, the characters themselves are problematic. In Eddie Huang’s piece in Vulture, he says, “Randall was neutered, Constance was exoticized, and Young Eddie was urbanized so that the viewers got their mise-en-place.” This is clearly true for Young Eddie, who is only shown wearing T-shirts with Biggie, Nas or the Wu-Tang Clan logo on them. Although the nod to hip-hop is interesting and fresh, it is overdone. Hip-hop fans will be polarized by the soundtrack — which only consists of The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa,” Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” and Snoop Dogg’s “G’z and Hustlas.” The theme song even stars rapper Danny Brown. More importantly, one has to wonder how long the show can sustain, when the bulk of the story concerns the portrayal of surface level misunderstandings between Asians and Caucasians.
Despite these problems, the show is important, because for the first time in 20 years there is a lead family of Asian-Americans on TV. For the past two decades, cultural progression and diversity have been largely absent in network television — and “Fresh Off the Boat” has the opportunity to reinvigorate TV in that specific way. But, will the show be able to go deeper than what Huang termed “a reverse-yellowface show with universal white stories played out by Chinamen”?
Huang stirred up much controversy leading up to the release of the show including refusing to say the line “America IS great” during narration. But Huang remained somewhat optimistic, saying, “They offered to put orange chicken on TV for 22 minutes a week instead of Salisbury steak … and I’ll eat it, I’ll even thank them, because if you’re high enough, orange chicken ain’t so bad.”
A scene in the pilot best summarizes the state of the show. After being forced to reveal that he threw away his mom’s cooking in attempts to fit in at school Eddie begs his parents to buy him Lunchables. His parents scold him, but he replies, “I need white people lunch, that gets me a seat at the table. Then you get to change the rules. Represent, like Nas says… I got big plans, first get a seat at the table, second meet Shaq, third change the game.”
“Fresh Off the Boat” is trying to get a seat at the table. Past the network friendliness of the show, it has the potential to tackle dense issues as well as pave the way for more diverse and pointed TV.
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