6/26/2023 0 Comments Fresh off the boat castBut Paul Lee said, “This show belongs on ABC.” I didn’t want to be Charlie Brown and ABC is Lucy with the football. I had just had my previous show, Don’t Trust the B- in Apartment 23, canceled on ABC. So we definitely were not thinking about that. How conscious were you of the dearth of Asian-American stories on TV before you got the pickup?Įvery step of the way, the odds are stacked against you. Now wrapped on her last season with the show, she reflected recently on its unique journey, TV’s history of avoiding topical comedy, and telling immigrant stories at a time when America is debating a border wall. Khan recently signed a deal that will move her from Disney-owned 20th Century Fox to Universal Television - and will take her off of Fresh Off the Boat should the series return for a sixth season. “It’s about how we all navigate life in this country, a type of solidarity that’s specifically American.” “This show is really about popular culture, the place you grow up,” she says. Wu, for one, believes the show’s success has less to do with its diversity than with its more universal themes. That number, though still modest, would have been unheard of just five years ago.Īs for the series’ own enduring appeal, 4 million viewers still tune in on Friday nights. As Fresh Off the Boat, once an anomaly, hits 100 episodes April 5, four broadcast comedy pilots fronted by Asian-American actors are in various stages of production. The scope of that change stands to broaden significantly come fall. “There are people who think change isn’t happening fast enough, but it’s actually happening. “The adage when I was coming up was that Asian-Americans were great side characters,” adds Mar, himself Chinese-American. “The expectation for me during pilot season was always the best friend, the co-worker, the lab technician,” says Randall Park, whose role as the Huang patriarch was among the first cast by executive producer Melvin Mar. Save for ABC’s Black-ish, which had premiered a few months earlier, the 20th Century Fox-produced comedy was the lone half-hour on the Big Four with a person of color at the top of the call sheet. “I imagine there were other series about Asian families in that time that just never made it onto the schedule, but the fact that we actually got a shot was a big deal.”įresh Off the Boat arrived at a moment when broadcast comedy was overwhelmingly white. “We premiered February of 2015, which just so happened to be 20 years since All-American Girl,” recalls Khan, 46, whose own parents immigrated to the U.S. ![]() The veteran scribe just wanted her pilot, which focused on the famous Taiwanese-American chef’s childhood in 1990s Florida, to be seen by more than a test audience and a handful of executives.īut four years after Fresh Off the Boat made its way onto ABC as broadcast’s first series to be fronted by an Asian-American cast in two decades - since Margaret Cho’s mid-’90s sitcom All-American Girl - the family comedy now airs in a very different entertainment landscape, one where a film like Crazy Rich Asians(starring Boat‘s lead Constance Wu) can pull $239 million at the global box office. When Nahnatchka Khan set out to adapt Eddie Huang’s memoir for television, she had no plans of shifting any industry narratives.
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