I was psyched to check out Fresh Off the Boat because as Margaret Cho has complained for decades, there are not enough tv shows where the main protagonists are Asian. Fresh Off the Boat is a fairly standard sitcom, but Constance Wu’s mom, Jessica, is the only character that I’m truly invested in, and she isn’t supposed to be the main character, but she steals every episode. She is competitive, driven, miserly, loves Stephen King books and scary movies and is excellent in every way. Oddly enough, the last episode, which explicitly looks at race, felt furthest from honoring the characters created in the series.

SPOILER ALERT

Jessica is cheap. She would never drop a macaroni casserole because of a cultural crisis. Fresh Off the Boat works incidentally on racial issues by simply showing a Chinese family’s daily life. I hope that the show does not try to imitate Black-ish by obsessively pondering whether or not they are Chinese enough OR if they do, that they don’t sacrifice established characters for a clunky message. I am aware that Fresh Off the Boat is based on a memoir so everything that I have written may be wrong. Maybe it did happen that way, and the series reflected the inconsistencies of real life. I’ll find out once I read the book. Either way, I’ll still watch Fresh Off the Boat next season.