“Fresh Off the Boat” is an ABC sitcom about the Huang family, including first-generation Taiwanese-American Eddie Huang, navigating life through a particularly white Orlando suburb. It is the first network television show in 20 years to feature an Asian-American family. Prior to that, Margaret Cho’s “All-American Girl” aired for a season from 1994-95.
“It’s incredibly exciting… such an amazing experience to be a part of,” says “Fresh Off the Boat” Showrunner Nahnatcha Khan. “Our responsibility is really all about creating multidimensional characters that people can relate to and invest in — ones they care about and want to watch week after week. If we’re successful at that, then hopefully the show goes for many seasons and episodes!”
The sitcom is based off of real-life celebrity chef Eddie Huang’s memoir of the same name. Huang has had a contentious relationship with the show, going back and forth on whether he feels it is true to his memoir. Regardless, he has stated that he sees the show as a positive contribution to Asian-American representation in the media. He tweeted this on April 7, 2015:
“Eddie has had a complicated relationship with the show, something he’s been very clear and open about from the beginning, and he continues to have a complicated relationship with it,” says Khan. “But we’ve also been very clear and open about the fact that the show isn’t a documentary or a bio-pic. The television Huangs are fictionalized characters doing and saying things that the real life Huangs never did and said.”
Student Alex Malblanc’s mother is Eddie Huang’s cousin: “He isn’t my uncle but that’s what I call him because that’s how my mom’s side of the family operates. Even within the extended family, we are pretty close,” explains Malblanc.
He says his mother’s family has ranged from a very positive reaction to the show to active apathy to relatives who disown the whole endeavor.
“I think the show is a fun caricature of his life, and holds a vastly skewed view of how [Eddie’s life] actually went. That being said, it’s a sitcom,” he says. “If it was entirely accurate, it would be boring. I have heard it called fun and playful, and I’ve heard it called racist, and I can understand both sides.”
People have taken to Twitter to express their feelings about the show, whether they love it or hate it. This Storify collects some of those Tweets over time:
Khan expresses that the show is incredibly important because it’s a step forward in the quest for the TV landscape to finally start mirroring the world around us.
“Showing people who come from different places with different backgrounds and stories than the ones we’ve been seeing year after year… It feels like it’s crazy that it took this long but we’re glad it’s happening,” she says. “Especially when you think about the kids who will grow up watching “Fresh Off the Boat” and that will become their new normal; they won’t know what it’s like to lack that level of representation.”
While Malblanc doesn’t believe the show necessarily presents a fair representation of Asian-Americans, he says that that’s not the point. It’s a sitcom, for the sake of comedy and entertainment, and he is satisfied with it at that level.
“I think that the show is a fun representation of [Eddie’s] struggles growing up, and most of them were based around his family’s Asian roots. It’s a thing I’ve struggled to justify because it can come across as racist, but I don’t know how else they would show the struggles of being a minority growing up in America while also being entertaining,” he says.
Malblanc believes that making a show that is simultaneously politically correct and attempting to portray the Asian-American experience is impossible. To him, there is good along with the bad, and he thinks that stereotypes are not wrong — just an incomplete pictures of a demographic.
Khan tries to reconcile this by creating multifaceted characters that she says can be flawed at times, but never for a cheap laugh.
“That also has to do with the viewpoint of the show — of these characters looking out at and commenting on the world around them instead of being in a fishbowl with others looking at them,” Khan explains. “We tell our stories from the inside out and that provides an intimacy and reliability to the show that we’re very proud of.”
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Actress Chhaya Néné believes that “Fresh Off the Boat” is a step forward for Asian-American representation in the media. In this video, she discusses how she would approach creating and starring in a similar show about an Indian-American family:
*If video does not work, click on this link