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‘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 rudimentary. Over the past five years, Asian American representation in Hollywood has vastly improved. In 2018, we got Crazy Rich Asians, a glossy Hollywood rom-com that shattered all expectations; the year after, we got The Farewell, an indie family drama that landed star Awkwafina a Golden Globe for best actress. Next year, we’ll get Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a Marvel movie with a primarily Asian cast. There have been some growing pains (see: Awkwafina’s blaccent and Constance Wu’s Twitter), and there’s more work to be done to better represent the vast spectrum of Asian American experiences. But it seems safe to say that within this expansive array of creations, many stereotypes have been disassembled. The idea that a film or series should be worthwhile simply because it addresses a stereotype seems too low of a bar.
Yet stereotypes were critics’ primary preoccupation with FOTB when it debuted in February 2015. Many reviews and essays — from Asian…
