Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, so each week, I, an Asian American writer, am praising an Asian American performer’s work in a recent or current TV role.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Sean Callery’s “Fight at Luke’s Bar” from the first season of Jessica Jones. I couldn’t find the right instrumental for an aural companion to the violent and streetwise sides of the subject of today’s header—on YouTube, there are a ton of Joseph LoDuca Xena: Warrior Princess score cues I considered attaching to today’s header, but Xena’s “Basil Poledouris on a shoestring budget” sound does not fit the actress and her Philadelphia gangster character—and the closest thing I could find was “Fight at Luke’s Bar.”

Poorna Jagannathan first came to my attention as Safar Khan, the hard-working immigrant mother of Naz Khan, a wrongly accused Pakistani American murder suspect whose gradual transformation in prison into a cold-blooded thug to survive the big house alienates Safar, on the one-season HBO legal drama The Night Of. On the much less serious Deli Boys, which Hulu binge-released two months ago, Jagannathan got to play the hardened thug this time, and the glam Lucky Auntie is a character she enjoyed playing so much that, as she admitted in a Marie Claire interview, Lucky’s wild “’90s supermodel meets ’70s Zeenat Aman” vibe—from Thierry Mugler jackets to leather jumpsuits—caused her to upgrade her off-screen clothing.

Deli Boys is currently those three TV industry words I hate—“on the bubble”—and I hope Jagannathan gets to continue playing Lucky. I also hope Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh get to continue playing Mir and Raj Dar, a pair of in-over-their-heads Pakistani American Muslim brothers Lucky vowed to watch over as if they were her blood nephews after Baba Dar, a Philly convenience store magnate who ran DarCo, his convenience store company, as a front for cocaine distribution and mentored Lucky in the coke trade, was killed in comedic fashion in front of his sons.

Baba Dar (played by Iqbal Theba from Glee, which I never watched aside from its pilot and that Glee episode Fox aired after one of its Super Bowl broadcasts, so I know Theba only from his roles as Abed’s dad on Community and Devi’s uncle on Jagannathan’s earlier show, Never Have I Ever) never told Mir and Raj about Dark DarCo, his coke distribution company, to shield his pampered sons from the violence and mayhem that comes with the coke business. A bunch of attempts by FBI Agent Mercer (played by Alexandra Ruddy, the wife of Deli Boys creator Abdullah Saeed) to take down Baba’s empire scares the Dar brothers into taking over Dark DarCo and restructuring it to keep the Feds off their backs.

Instead of viewing the brothers as two of her rivals in her quest for power like all the maliks (the Arabic word for “kings”) she bickers with because the all-male boardroom underestimates her actions as the top consigliere in their organization, Lucky does what Baba should have done a long time ago: Train Mir, an industrious business school grad, and Raj, a much less industrious stoner, to be criminals. She genuinely loves her mentor’s sons and is protective of them even though their bumbling ways drive her up the wall sometimes. Her interactions with them sometimes bring to mind the scenes between the Swedish murder machine named Brock Samson and the pair of socially awkward and repeatedly cloned teens he guards (and clearly loves but will never say, “I love you,” to, simply because he’s a murder machine): Hank and Dean Venture.

Deli Boys isn’t a glum crime drama about how much it sucks to be a criminal even though there’s a thrill and allure to being one. And it isn’t exactly Weeds either. Weeds creator Jenji Kohan was a fan of The Shield, and she wanted her show’s Vic Mackey counterpart to be a weed-dealing suburban widow who fiercely protects her sons but also frequently does things that alienate Showtime’s audience and cause the actress who portrayed her to admit that if her character were a real-life woman, she would kind of hate her guts. (“I play her, but I don’t know that I’d hang out with her… If she was thinking about her kids properly, would she put them in the jeopardy she does? She doesn’t reflect much, so she makes grave mistakes,” said Weeds star Mary-Louise Parker to the Guardian in 2007.)

There’s no time for that kind of moral ambiguity on the fast-paced (and very-quick-to-binge) Deli Boys. Lucky is nothing like Weeds’s extremely flawed Nancy Botwin and is instead a likable action heroine in the mold of Pam Grier, Michelle Yeoh, and the aforementioned Zeenat Aman.

Sometimes you just want an escapist crime comedy where the criminals are from a community that isn’t often represented on American TV. Deli Boys does “underworld farce full of non-stereotypical South Asian characters” really well.

Long before Deli Boys, a thing I quickly grew tired of in the early ’00s was the pre-Harold & Kumar Asian American indie flick about assimilation and the disagreements between immigrant parents and their second-generation children (examples: The Debut and American Chai). But the funniest of those indie flicks was The Flip Side, director Rod Pulido’s 2001 comedy about three Filipino American siblings who each represent a different approach to assimilation. (My older brother was—at UC Santa Cruz, the same university I later attended—a less extreme version of the sibling who wants to get in touch with the culture of his ancestors and comes home from college dressed like a pre-colonial Visayan guy in The Flip Side.)

However, The Flip Side was occasionally a chore to watch because it had the production values of Tone Lōc’s black-and-white video for “Wild Thing” (Tamra Davis directed that cheesy but charming video long before she directed her most popular movie, Half Baked) and a cast of mostly non-actors who had zero screen presence—except for the elderly non-actor who played the siblings’ WWII veteran lolo (Tagalog for “grandpa”), the most likable character in The Flip Side. (Pulido, who grew frustrated over his failed attempts to make a second film after The Flip Side—it was going to be a period piece about Pinoy breakdancers in the ’80s—and then switched to becoming a YA author, posted The Flip Side in its entirety on his YouTube account. I haven’t watched The Flip Side since I first saw it at a Bay Area press screening in 2001 because I’m not sure if it has aged well, while Pulido has said on his blog that a new generation of Filipinos who didn’t know of the existence of his only film is responding well to it.)

The middle child in The Flip Side, a girl with a white boyfriend, pretends to be Hawaiian because she thinks white guys with an Asian fetish prefer Hawaiian girls over Pinays, and she hates her Filipino nose, so she gets a nose job that ultimately doesn’t improve her life. The funniest character on Deli Boys is a 2020s version of what The Flip Side made fun of in its nose job subplot and a subplot about basketball: the Asian American who wants to be a different Asian ethnicity or a different kind of POC.

Newcomer Amita Rao, a regular on the about-to-premiere FX series Adults, is amusing as Nandika, the second-generation daughter of a pair of Indian restaurateurs Lucky, Mir, and Raj form a new partnership with when the trio is forced to abandon Baba’s old method of keeping the coke hidden within his sprawling chain of delis. Mir grows comfortable with the coke trade over the course of the season (Deli Boys turns his arc into a comedy version of Michael Corleone’s arc in the first Godfather flick), and Raj views the business as a temporary thing in his life, whereas Nandika, who works at her parents’ restaurant and finds herself drawn to Raj, wants no part of her parents’ business and aspires to be a professional cosplayer.

Princess Mononoke happened to be the first Studio Ghibli film I watched and enjoyed (but it wasn’t the first Hayao Miyazaki film I saw—Princess Mononoke was preceded by Miyazaki’s pre-Ghibli The Castle of Cagliostro, a big-screen version of Lupin the 3rd Part II I first watched on VHS a few years before Princess Mononoke’s arrival in America). That’s why I find Nandika’s admiration of San from Princess Mononoke and her irritation with her dad’s lack of knowledge about Japanese animation to be really funny. (Princess Mononoke has also been in the news lately because GKIDS recently brought the film back to American theaters in the form of a 4K restoration for IMAX exhibition, while OpenAI is pissing off anti-AI artists and Ghibli fans because of its Ghibli-style AI tool.)

At one point, Nandika tries to flirt with Raj, who would rather be faithful to Prairie (played by Alfie Fuller), a Black hippie chick he’s in a serious relationship with, by speaking to him in Japanese—a hilarious sign that Nandika has a big-time Japan fetish and would rather be Japanese. I’ve seen a few Asian Americans go through phases like this in real life (however, none of them were trying to be Japanese), while The Flip Side and Deli Boys have been the only Asian American comedies I’ve seen that depict that type of Asian American.

If Deli Boys is renewed, I’ll be looking forward to what Rao will do in her role as Nandika. (Without giving too much away about the finale, Nandika becomes a more prominent character.) But the breakout character of Deli Boys is undoubtedly Lucky, a change-of-pace role for Poorna Jagannathan, who, after the aforementioned The Night Of, played a lonely Muslim housewife who has an affair with Ramy Youssef’s title character on Ramy and a widowed Indian dermatologist mom on Never Have I Ever. I’ve never seen her play a gangster. Not many sitcom moms jump from comforting troubled teens and making them home-cooked meals to throwing knives at assassins. Jagannathan does it with aplomb on Deli Boys.

In Deli Boys’s sixth episode, “Lucky Boys,” which was nicely directed by Andrew Ahn, the director of the new remake of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, the show briefly explores a side of Lucky she doesn’t show to anybody else because she was taken advantage of when she was a kid, and she will never let anybody else take advantage of her again. The episode made me say to myself, “Mm-hmm, this is why they cast Jagannathan. Despite the vampy outfits, she grounds this show.” On Never Have I Ever, she had a few moments of depth as a widow who’s still grieving. In “Lucky Boys,” she brings that same kind of depth to a woman who had a rough childhood and is grieving the loss of the man who rescued her from that childhood and was like a big brother to her.

“The fact that my character gets a flashback is such a privilege,” said Jagannathan in an IndieWire article about the filming of “Lucky Boys” that was posted two days ago. “I, as an actor, never get a backstory. It’s just one of those things, right? As an actor of color, as a South Asian woman — I often say I’m so used to being at the back of the story versus having a backstory. It’s two very different scenarios.”

Otherwise, this is one of the least dramatic roles Jagannathan has played, and Deli Boys is a farce in the style of Pineapple Express and the Barry Sonnenfeld version of Get Shorty. It dismantles South Asian stereotypes in a non-didactic and gleeful way that brings to mind the Harold & Kumar flicks. Here’s hoping that Jagannathan gets to take on—or terrorize—the stunt performers who play Dark DarCo’s enemies for a few more years (“Her beautifully choreographed fight scenes that leave bad men bloody are a jolt of inspiration for brown women who have suffered the ‘gentle, submissive’ trope for too long,” wrote Alisha Sahay at HuffPost) and that Deli Boys doesn’t get fitted for cement shoes.