Watching “Fresh Off the Boat,” the new ABC sitcom based on Eddie Huang’s eponymous memoir about growing up in Orlando, Florida, defies the time-space continuum in more ways than one. It’s not just that the series is set in the 1990s, or that I haven’t voluntarily viewed anything so old-school “sitcommy” since then. It’s that the last time television so matter-of-factly broke a glass ceiling was when “Will & Grace,” which featured two gay male characters, became an NBC smash in 1998. “Fresh Off the Boast” is the first stateside sitcom to star an Asian actor since Margaret Cho’s ill-fated “All-American Girl” was canceled in 1995 – the same year this series is set.
This doesn’t automatically mean “Fresh Off the Boat” is worth watching. Huang himself initially expressed trepidation about the production, suggesting it was a “reverse yellow face” – an attempt to fit an Asian American family into a traditional white TV family template. Others have rushed to the show’s defense. In a Slate roundtable, NPR’s Kat Chow agreed that it was “like a traditional sitcom” but praised it for “the various signposts for Asian Americans woven into them … the stinky tofu as the ‘weird Asian food’ … the ‘success perm.'” Continue Reading →
