'Fresh' Sitcom Makes You Laugh -- and Think
SAN DIEGO -- A lot of what is on television seems stale. But ABC has a fresh new offering that deserves to be watched, praised and nurtured. Because if it fails to find an audience, we won't be this lucky again for a long time.
Such is the special burden of multicultural comedies. When a TV show about a white family flops, network executives don't shy away from other shows featuring white families. That would be silly. But for shows that explore the experience of Asian-Americans, Latinos or other immigrant groups, it's a whole other story. Good luck getting anything else on the air for the next couple of decades.
The captivating family sitcom "Fresh Off the Boat" (airing Tuesdays at 8 p.m.) was criticized even before the first episode premiered.
The phrase "fresh off the boat" -- which is also the title of the 2013 memoir by New York chef Eddie Huang on which the series is based -- is considered a slur by many Asian-Americans, intended to put down those who haven't fully assimilated.
It's an old story. In the 1800s, Chinese immigrants streaming into California were labeled "unassimilable" by nativists.
The family in the sitcom doesn't have that problem. The Huangs are of Taiwanese descent and move from the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., to Orlando, Florida, to support the father's dream of opening a restaurant. They skillfully navigate the mainstream while maintaining their culture.
Therefore, while the title is deliberately provocative, the controversy surrounding it seems much ado about nothing.
The more justified criticism was aimed at an ill-conceived marketing strategy that, leading up to the pilot, included a tweet of a graphic of racial caricatures -- an Asian in a pointy bamboo hat, a Mexican in a sombrero, an African in a kufi, an Indian wearing a turban -- along with the condescending phrase "We're all a little #FreshOffTheBoat."
After Huang himself complained about the tweet, calling the imagery "reductive," it was deleted.
The snafu was insulting, but also instructive. We can assume that the folks on the ABC social media team who thought that minimizing the experience of Asians, Latinos, Africans, and Indians was a clever and effective way to promote a new show were not Asian, Latino, African or Indian. Otherwise, alarm bells might have gone off.
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Copyright 2015 Washington Post Writers Group
