‘Fresh Off the Boat’ Wasn’t Perfect, but It Was Radical in Its Own Way
The family sitcom confronted Asian American stereotypes but struggled to live up to expectations
Sometime in 2015, a few months after Fresh Off the Boat premiered on ABC, one of my professors was asked by a student group to facilitate a discussion on the show. At the time, she was the school’s only faculty member in Asian American Studies, which made her the resident expert on FOTB, even if her research had nothing to do with it.
But there was a problem: In her office, she privately confessed to me that she didn’t quite like the show. She conceded that FOTB’s willingness to refute stereotypes — by first inhabiting, then humanizing them — was indeed commendable, yet she also found the series wholly unfunny. I disagreed with her take, but the conversation stuck with me. As a screenwriting hopeful myself, I walked out of her office wondering if this was to be the primary function of Asian American art: to sneak humanity into the trojan horse of a stereotype and pray that viewers will come away having learned a lesson.
As Fresh Off the Boat, the sitcom set in the ’90s and early 2000s and based loosely on Eddie Huang’s memoir, prepares to end its historic six-season run tonight, that notion now feels rote and…
