Reading the book, then watching the show, you get why Huang was frustrated: without a cruel bully for a father, Eddie’s taste for hip-hop feels more superficial-in the book, it’s an abused kid’s catharsis and an identification with black history. “Fresh Off the Boat” is part of a larger movement within television, on shows that include the CW’s “Jane the Virgin” and Fox’s “Empire”-a trend that’s most influential when it creates a hit, not a niche phenomenon. But simply watching people of color having a private conversation, one that’s not primarily about white people, is a huge deal. This can be an unpleasantly clinical way to talk: it places the critic in the camp of the bean counters, not the gonzo rapscallions. The characters aren’t the hero’s best friends they’re not macho cartoons or eye candy, either, as on some cable dramas I could name. She uses the Asian-American family to reset TV’s defaults. Khan, the showrunner (who wrote for Seth MacFarlane, and who produced the wicked ABC sitcom “Don’t Trust the B- in Apartment 23”), is her own sort of provocateur, an expert at slipping rude ideas into polite formats. Yet, even in its half-dozen early episodes, those burnt first pancakes of sitcoms, the show has a radical quality, simply because it arrives in a television landscape with few Asian characters, almost none of them protagonists. It’s a comedy the whole family can watch together-which may be either an insult or a compliment, but is definitely a business plan. There’s even a “Wonder Years”-esque voice-over, performed by Huang, and an ensemble of adorable children. The parents-patriotic restaurant-manager dad, Louis (Randall Park), and proudly alienated mom, Jessica (the terrific Constance Wu)-love one another. The jokes aren’t dirty and nobody gets his butt whipped. So it’s no surprise that, aesthetically, “Fresh Off the Boat” fits right into ABC’s sweet-tempered slate of comedies, which includes the subtly retrograde “Modern Family,” the wonderful “The Middle,” “The Goldbergs,” “Black-ish”-a smart new show that I’ll get to in a moment-and the unfortunately bland “Cristela.” Like all these shows, “Fresh Off the Boat” is brightly lit, with an A plot and a B plot. Even the edgiest shows have limits: Al Bundy never hit Peggy, after all. In reality, of course, the bad-boy provocateur very rarely gets final cut on a network family sitcom-it’s a genre more prone to compromise than a Senate bill. In the process, he was claiming TV’s own bad-boy role, the provocateur who shoves authenticity down the throat of The Man. That desire wasn’t sheerly egotistical: Huang was eager to push back at the cliché of Asian men as passive, genitally cheated nerds (“the eunuch who can count,” as he puts it in the book)-a Long Duk Dong stereotype still visible on shows like CBS’s “2 Broke Girls.” Huang wanted “Fresh Off the Boat” to “go hard,” like his nineties hip-hop heroes. With Free Wonton Soup or Soda.” Thousands of words in, Huang tossed out a few lines of praise, but the impression he left wasn’t great-if he saw his sitcom as a sellout, who were viewers to disagree?Īt the heart of this rant was the question of what makes TV bold: Huang wanted something pungent, like an FX anti-hero dramedy, or like the nineties sitcom “Married with Children,” the type of show that would underline (and maybe glamorize) his violent youth, his charismatic dick of a dad, and the roots of Huang’s own flamboyant persona. “What did you buy my book for?” Huang yelled, frustrated that the show had bowdlerized his story, which included whippings by his father, an immigrant restaurant owner. In an essay in New York, Eddie Huang, the celebrity chef, Vice TV host, and author of the memoir “Fresh Off the Boat,” merrily trash-talked his own collaborators, including a Chinese-American producer, whom he called an “Uncle Chan,” and the showrunner, Nahnatchka Khan, an Iranian-American. In an unusual twist, this hazing came from the man whose life the show was based on. Like many pioneering TV series, ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat,” a sitcom about a Taiwanese-American family running a Western-themed chophouse in Orlando, Florida, débuted to impossibly high expectations, hand-wringing, and prickly waves of preëmptive backlash. If “Fresh Off the Boat” emphasizes family warmth, it’s complicated by sharp details.
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