And it has a really funny line about Burt Reynolds and Cop And A Half in the second episode, though you won't necessarily want to explain it to your littlest ones. It's a family with a lot of rootable, likable people in it. There's a warmth to the show, though, that feels earned. Every episode has a couple of moments like that, where a new facet is added to a pretty ordinary sitcom plot and even a jaded eyebrow may go up in interest. ![]() He's right that a lot of the feel-good lessons aren't exactly daring in the face of what television has been saying for decades about everything being ultimately universal.īut he's also right that there are bracing moments in which this show is pushing on dynamics that don't come up all that often, as when Eddie finds himself tussling with the black kid at his school over who's "on the bottom" of the pecking order. It's certainly not a great show Eddie Huang is right that they're taking a pretty safe, not very provocative approach to putting this family in front of the viewers of ABC. Wu has a tough task here, because her hard-driving mom could easily drift into stereotype, but they're smart to give her a personal story early on in which she's called upon to decide whether to stand up to bullies, much like Eddie has to do at school. Louis and Gene both wished to go, but wishing to be. When Gene and Louis were young adults, their father offered to send one of them to the United States of America, as he did not have enough money to send both of his sons. They're still settling into the rhythms of this family, but Constance Wu as mom Jessica and Randall Park as dad Louis are both very good at making rather sitcommy lines sound better than they would in less careful hands. Huang and Jenny Huang, and was raised in Taiwan with his older brother, Louis. It's a slightly detached retelling by the central character, almost adopting a little bit of the ability mockumentary shows like Modern Family have to let characters reflect on their own folly.įor the early stages of the show, it's really all about the execution of the material. That's not necessarily surprising - CBS procedurals have a style, as do ABC dramas and as did many of the successful NBC comedies of the '80s and '90s. As already mentioned, it feels, in structure and style and mood, a lot like Black-ish, with young Eddie Huang taking the sardonic narration over in the place of Anthony Anderson as Andre Johnson. In the first three episodes that the network made available, you get a pretty basic set of family stories: kids trying to make friends, kids getting goofy and ill-advised ideas, mom trying to navigate the crazy neighborhood ladies, dad dealing with the problems at his restaurant, mom trying to lower the boom about school. (Make sure you get to the end, though there's a turn.)īut it's also worth at least considering the show simply as a self-contained half-hour of broadcast comedy, separate from any obligation to break ground, and asking: is it any good? It's well worth reading this New York Times piece by Wesley Yang, which interrogates the "tortured ambivalence" the real Eddie Huang has about the show, as well as the long piece he wrote for New York Magazine about finding most of the pilot silly and frustrating but a sliver of it energizing.
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