Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
May has been Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, so each week, I, an Asian American writer, have been praising an Asian American performer’s work in a recent or current TV role. I previously discussed Ravi Patel as Patel on Animal Control, Poorna Jagannathan as Lucky Auntie on Deli Boys, Eugene Cordero as Rutherford on Star Trek: Lower Decks, and Patti Harrison’s guest spots on I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Nick Lee’s “Willis Tunnel” from Interior Chinatown.
Asian Pacific American Heritage Month concludes with Jimmy O. Yang’s role for creator/showrunner Charles Yu’s recent miniseries adaptation of his own 2020 hit novel about Asian American representation. Yang was solid in his first lead role as Willis Wu, a Chinese restaurant waiter in search of his missing older brother, a kung fu expert. Willis and Fatty, his best friend/co-worker, don’t know that they’re merely side characters in a script for a Chinatown episode of a generic cop show about a stoic white female homicide detective—played by recent After Midnight guest host Lisa Gilroy, one of the funniest guest panelists on the Dropout shows Make Some Noise and Game Changer—and her equally stoic Black partner (played by Sullivan Jones).
Several of Interior Chinatown’s most amusing moments were about Willis unknowingly disrupting the order of things in the script and doing a better job at investigating his brother’s whereabouts than the supposed heroes of the show. Yang and Ronny Chieng, who played Fatty, are both stand-up comics. Chieng basically played his usual self from his stand-up act and his Daily Show segments—a surly wiseass—while Yang had the more challenging role of shifting between drama (his angst over both a meaningless existence and the possibility that his brother is dead) and comedy (his growing attraction to Lana Lee, a biracial Asian detective well played by Chloe Bennet).
I never watched Silicon Valley, where Yang played Jian-Yang, the HBO show’s sole East Asian character, but Interior Chinatown was the opposite of what Jane Hu complained about in her Los Angeles Review of Books piece on Silicon Valley and what she viewed as tiresome and often offensive jokes at Jian-Yang’s expense.
“For four seasons, I squinted and grimaced during scenes featuring Jian-Yang, as I watched the show attempt to negotiate the odd presence of their token ‘inscrutable Oriental.’ It was not always flatly offensive or predictable, but it was, in many ways, one of the show’s weakest points, especially given the relative density of Asians and Asian-Americans in Silicon Valley,” wrote Hu.
Meanwhile, during Interior Chinatown, Gilroy was the sole white regular surrounded by actors of color who were playing characters who were full of depth, and Detective Green, her attractive but arrogant and shallow character, was, for most of Interior Chinatown’s run, the butt of the joke.
Green was Yu’s way of parodying the white lead characters from cop shows that did cheesy and offensive Chinatown episodes, while the rest of Interior Chinatown was his way of imagining how much better all those Chinatown episodes would have been if they humanized the ordinary folks in Chinatown instead of othering them and glorifying the gwailos who storm into Chinatown once in a while just to slap around stereotypical Chinese street toughs or cuff them.
Yu’s Hulu miniseries proved that Yang can handle drama quite well, just like Patti Harrison did in Together Together, a really good indie comedy about gestational surrogacy I mentioned last week. (Tig Notaro was even more serious than her in Together Together as a couples therapist.) Both Steve Martin and John Candy skillfully shifted from comedy to drama and back again in 1987’s Planes, Trains & Automobiles, while Ray Romano and a pre-Brooklyn Nine-Nine Andre Braugher interestingly played against type on TNT’s Men of a Certain Age, a great hour-long comedy/drama where Romano starred as a party store owner with a crippling gambling addiction, Braugher played a car salesman who hates his job, and Scott Bakula played their promiscuous actor friend. Braugher, known at the time for being a serious actor on Homicide: Life on the Street and in Shakespeare plays, was often the more quippy lead on MOACA, while Romano was the more serious lead. It was a really effective role reversal. Marc Maron was also surprisingly great during his character’s non-comedic moments on GLOW. Today’s prompt is: Post a favorite example of a comedian doing a serious scene, whether it’s on TV or on the big screen.