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

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is H. Scott Salinas and Reza Safinia’s main title theme from all three seasons of the Cinemax/HBO Max action drama Warrior, represented here by Method Design’s first-season version of Warrior’s opening title sequence. The unskippable Warrior opening titles were directed by John Likens and art-designed by lead designer Arisu Kashiwagi, who helped design the opening titles for both Stranger Things and Jessica Jones.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, so in each header this month, I, an Asian American writer, will be discussing one of my favorite episodes of Warrior, a series I instantly loved when I watched it for the first time on Netflix right before it left the streamer earlier this year. The fact that nobody in the Couch Avocados comments section said, “I watched Warrior, too,” whenever I mentioned the show frustrates me. It’s a shame that it’s not better known.

Created by Banshee co-creator Jonathan Tropper, Warrior is my favorite out of several American-made martial arts dramas with predominantly Asian casts. Tropper showran Warrior’s first two seasons and brought to life—with the help of a group of executive producers that included Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter, and Justin Lin—a treatment Bruce Lee wrote for an unproduced TV series he created.

Warrior was a gangster drama about the Chinatown tong wars in 1870s San Francisco, as well as a show about Chinese immigrants fighting against anti-Chinese oppression (Warrior occasionally echoed the depiction of Japanese oppression of the Chinese in 1972’s Fist of Fury, which I watched for the first time via Criterion’s Bruce Lee box set a few months ago) while independent businesswomen—whether they’re Mexican, white, or Chinese—try to navigate a system that’s stacked against them. But whether the storyline was about Ah Sahm—nicely played by British actor Andrew Koji, the new Ryu in the upcoming Street Fighter, the third and latest attempt at a live-action Street Fighter flick—feuding with his older sister, the leader of a tong at war with the tong Ah Sahm joined, or Olivia Cheng’s Ah Toy falling in love with a white lesbian vineyard owner, one thing was constant: terrific fight choreography led by stunt coordinator Brett Chan. (The Warrior fight choreographer happens to be Pinoy like I am and was one of several Filipinos who played a major role on Warrior, along with third-season regulars Mark Dacascos and Chelsea Muirhead.)

From now until May 28, May at the Couch Avocados column is You Get May?! The most frequently repeated line on Warrior was “You get me?”

If Warrior had been made 35 years ago for linear TV, I would have said those three words a lot to my classmates because I would have wanted to sound like the characters from Warrior. This series would have been massive back when linear TV was king. It had the misfortune of coming out on a dying premium cable channel that was about to eliminate its original programming department (Warrior ended up being Cinemax’s final original series) and then being neglected by HBO Home Entertainment, which used to release the entire runs of HBO original shows on physical media for cord cutters who didn’t have HBO and got hooked on some of its original shows via DVD.

Warrior’s first season, which aired in 2019, remains the only season HBO Home Entertainment released on Blu-ray. Somewhere, a frustrated Bruce Lee collector is ripping Warrior’s second and third seasons from HBO Max and creating for himself the second-and-third-season Warrior Blu-rays that will never see the light of day.

Tropper’s series was popular among Asian American viewers during the pandemic because its depiction of complex and flawed Asian characters standing up against discrimination empowered them at a time when they saw other Asian Americans being attacked on the street or persecuted.

“Catharsis is something that people need right now. In the context of a show, you can experience—and, hopefully, exorcise—some of that rage that you might not know what to do with otherwise. That’s a primary function of storytelling,” said Hoon Lee—a Banshee alum who reunited with Tropper to portray arms dealer Wang Chao, my favorite character on Warrior (partly because he doesn’t know any martial arts, so he relies on his wits to survive)—to Vice in 2021.

Though I liked the first two Karate Kid movies when I was a kid (I saw both of them when they were first released in theaters), I never watched the Karate Kid sequel series Cobra Kai simply because of its off-putting lack of Asian characters. Meanwhile, from the start, Warrior said to the audience—in bold letters that were as gritty and grimy as the Chinese hip-hop tracks that concluded every Warrior episode—“This is a martial arts drama from an Asian American point of view,” and despite being steered by a white showrunner every season (Warrior writers Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard replaced Tropper in the final season), it was full of Asian Americans in the writers’ room and the director’s chair. That’s a far cry from Kim’s Convenience showrunner Kevin White and his predominantly white writers’ room refusing to allow any of Kim’s Convenience’s Asian Canadian cast members to write or direct any episodes.

One of Warrior’s Asian American writers was Kenneth Lin (no relation to Justin Lin), a playwright and a House of Cards alum who recently co-wrote Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s suspenseful introduction of a new alien adversary called the Furies. He wrote my favorite episode from Warrior’s first season. Confined to a Nevada saloon invaded by gunslinging outlaws who are searching for gold and will murk anybody to get it, “The Blood and the Shit”—directed by Kevin Tancharoen (a prolific Thai American episodic TV director and the brother of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. co-showrunner Maurissa Tancharoen)—is one of the most entertaining bottle episodes ever made.

“The Blood and the Shit” takes a “bar under siege” story and places at the center of the crisis two Chinese American antiheroes who are far away from their Chinatown comfort zone: Ah Sahm—the bad boy who will later become torn between his loyalty to the Hop Wei tong and his growing sympathy with the plight of the ordinary Chinese folks the Hop Wei regularly extort money from—and his fellow Hop Wei member, libidinous knife fighter Young Jun (played by Jason Tobin in what has to be his best role since his turn as a reckless Orange County high-schooler in Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow).

“When am I ever going to be able to do a scene where two martial arts masters walk into a bar with a priest, a racist, and an Annie Oakley, with a dead Chinese guy in a coffin? You just don’t,” said Tancharoen to IndieWire in 2019.

In addition to that, “The Blood and the Shit” offers the rare sight of guest star C.S. Lee (convincingly) playing a tough and somber character who isn’t as dorky as the characters he played on Dexter and Fresh Off the Boat. (He played half of the interracial couple that runs the saloon and fiercely defends it from the outlaws with the help of Ah Sahm, Young Jun, and the other customers.) Lin and Tancharoen’s standalone episode—which pared the cast of regulars down to just Koji and Tobin and doesn’t require watching any prior Warrior episodes to get to know Ah Sahm and Young Jun—was so beloved by Warrior cast and crew members (as well as the show’s fanbase) that it started an annual Warrior tradition: the road trip episode that takes a break from the multiple power struggles in San Francisco and follows Ah Sahm and Young Jun as they travel outside Frisco and face an antagonist who’s neither a member of the Long Zii, the tong at war with the Hop Wei, nor a racist Irish thug.

A funny thing about each road trip episode—a highlight of each season—is that none of them were filmed in America. They were, like all other episodes of Warrior, filmed in Cape Town, South Africa.

This stuff’s made in Cape Town City!

Cape Town City?!

That really chaps my hide.

Next week: Warrior pits two titans of Southeast Asian action cinema against each other and gives one of them—Dustin Nguyen—the chance to ham it up as the live-action Batman villain he was born to play but will never get to because white Hollywood has no idea what to do with him (or Michael Jai White).