Fresh is the word: Checking in on Fresh Off the Boat

I was all set to dislike ABC's Fresh Off the Boat before its premiere. It wasn't because it was going to take celebrity chef Eddie Huang's candid and raunchy memoirs about his hip-hop-soundtracked childhood in Orlando in the '90s (which I've read only one or two excerpts of) and water down that book for network TV, which was what Huang, the show's off-screen narrator, said he was initially frustrated about while he consulted on the writing and filming of the Lynn Shelton-directed Fresh Off the Boat pilot (I wish Huang did a little more research about ABC sitcoms before he signed up to do business with ABC: someone should have reminded him it's the home of The Middle and The Goldbergs, not Louie and You're the Worst). I was all set to dislike the show for a different reason: it was going to be another goddamn story about second-generation Asian Americans dealing with identity issues, assimilation and generational differences with their elders.

As someone who's watched a shit-ton of Asian American indie movies, that kind of story was, for a long while, the only kind of Asian American indie flick that was getting made, whether it was Red Doors or American Chai. We're so underrepresented or poorly depicted in everything else in pop culture, and this shit is the best we can do on our own? It was becoming as much of a tired formula as Katherine Heigl rom-coms or "Die Hard on a boat!"--or "Die Hard in an office building!" The earnest indie drama about Asian American assimilation became so grating and hackneyed that graphic novelist Adrian Tomine spent the first five pages of Shortcomings hilariously tearing it apart.

"Why does everything have to be some big 'statement' about race? Don't any of these people just want to make a movie that's good?," grumbles Shortcomings' main character, Berkeley movie theater manager Ben Tanaka, after sitting through yet another Asian American drama about generational conflict.

My beef with the assimilation story has been more like "Can we get something else other than the assimilation story, like a story outside the family? Maybe a movie or show about an Asian American guy handling the many absurdities of the dating scene on his own? We do have lives outside the family, you know." That's why Emily Kapnek's Selfie was such a breath of fresh air--it was mostly about the love life and workplace dilemmas of John Cho's modern-day Henry Higgins, a pharmaceutical marketing whiz who gives rebranding advice to the show's social media-obsessed Eliza Doolittle counterpart, Karen Gillan's Eliza Dooley, and not once did the show insert Henry's parents into the narrative--and that's why its cancellation still stings. So after ABC deleted Selfie, I thought, "Alright, so the show I've longed to see on network TV for over a decade didn't last. I don't like the fact that you're yet another assimilation story, Fresh Off the Boat, but you better be damn well as funny as Selfie was."

Fortunately, Fresh Off the Boat is genuinely funny as it glimpses at the complexities of identity, and its slightly skewed take on the coming-of-age sitcom is what sets it apart from the overly earnest assimilation stories Ben Tanaka and I don't care for. That's mostly due to the guiding hand of showrunner Nahnatchka Khan, the veteran American Dad writer whose signature creation is Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. Khan's sharply written mismatched-roommates comedy revealed James Van Der Beek to be a skilled comedic actor and featured the great unsung pairing of Krysten Ritter and Dreama Walker, who were often so hilariously expressive without dialogue that I could easily picture Ritter and Walker as silent movie comediennes, and I even wished for Khan to do an entire Don't Trust the B---- episode as a silent movie.

All I wanted from Fresh Off the Boat was for the show to retain the weirdness Khan brought to Don't Trust the B----, and it's been doing that frequently. Part of the effectiveness of the surreal gags about the hellishness of the back of the school bus Eddie (Hudson Yang) and his friends ride while pretending to be comatose in "Showdown at the Golden Saddle" is due to the episode never showing what goes on in the back of the bus, as if it's too unpleasant to show on network TV. A classmate character's obsession with an NES game based on the 1980 movie 9 to 5 is a dead-on riff on how NES games would be spun off from the strangest licensed properties, whether it was Home Alone or Wayne's World. And there's a great little scene in "Persistent Romeo" where Evan (Ian Chen), Eddie's youngest brother, screams like a little girl for what feels like two hours after he loses to Grandma Huang (Lucille Soong) during poker. I don't know if it's a reference to this '90s moment, but that would be wonderful if it were. Something about male characters screaming like little girls while their expressions remain absolutely blank always kills me (it must have killed a Fresh Off the Boat crew member too because he can be heard audibly chuckling on the set off-screen while Evan screams).

It helps that Fresh Off the Boat takes some of its stylistic cues not from All-American Girl, the last network sitcom to center on an Asian American family (not counting the TBS show Sullivan & Son), but from the often enjoyable '80s period piece Everybody Hates Chris, which itself took stylistic cues from Everybody Hates Chris co-producer Howard Gewirtz's Oliver Beene, a 2003 Fox sitcom that took place in the early '60s. I remember watching All-American Girl in the '90s and being underwhelmed by it like so many other Asian American viewers, mostly because its version of Margaret Cho--whom Huang actually turned to for advice while initially struggling with the changes that were being made to the depiction of his own life as an 11-year-old--wasn't the Margaret Cho I was familiar with from her raunchy stand-up act. The dominant creative voice on All-American Girl actually belonged not to her, but to a veteran of the lily-white Empty Nest, a huge sign that Cho's show was doomed.

Fortunately, Fresh Off the Boat doesn't have a guy from Empty Nest in charge. Instead, it's the comedic mastermind behind Don't Trust the B----, surrounded by other writers of color like How I Met Your Mother veteran Kourtney Kang and stand-up comic Ali Wong. There wasn't a single authentic bone in All-American Girl's mad-homogenized and heavily micromanaged body, whereas Fresh Off the Boat captures many aspects of Asian American families quite well (like the Huangs' couch being covered in plastic or the Huang parents' "success perm," which isn't just a Chinese thing--it's kind of a Filipino thing as well) and gets a lot of the '90s right, whether it's the music Eddie prefers or the mom jeans look rocked by his cantankerous, Caddyshack-loving mother Jessica. Can we talk about Constance Wu for an hour? She's doing wonders with her role, turning it into something more nuanced than the Tiger Mom caricature that could have emerged in much lesser comedic hands.

Wu is actually much younger than her character, like how Nick Offerman, in real life, is much younger than his Parks and Rec alter ego Ron Swanson, but Ron is such a unique comedic creation that you can't picture anyone else but Offerman playing him had the casting gone differently (except maybe Sam Elliott, who wound up guest-starring as Ron's counterpart in Eagleton), and only Offerman could bring him to life so effectively. I feel the same way about Jessica Huang now. Despite her youth, Wu just brings a certain bearing and dimension--not to mention a certain kind of comic timing--to Jessica that I don't think any other actor could pull off.

Another hero of the show--and this person isn't getting as much praise from the press as Wu--is whoever has been music-supervising Fresh Off the Boat. Securing pricey hip-hop classics by the likes of Ol' Dirty Bastard and Snoop Dogg--it's thrilling to hear on a network sitcom all these tracks I grew up with just like Eddie--was probably no easy feat. The show's '90s hip-hop soundtrack is anchored by an original theme song by Danny Brown, whom Huang himself recruited to record the theme, probably just for the thrill of saying that he slipped Danny Brown, who often makes 2 Live Crew look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, into an ABC family sitcom. The brief tune introduces Danny Brown to a new audience and will hopefully get those viewers to become enthralled by the Detroit rapper's storytelling skills in tracks like "Grown Up" and "25 Bucks."

But perhaps my favorite musical moment on the show so far takes place in "Showdown at the Golden Saddle," when Eddie's crush on his neighbor and babysitter Nicole (Luna Blaise, who looks like a teenage Krysten Ritter) is soundtracked by the DeBarge-sampling remix of the Notorious B.I.G./Faith Evans/Mary J. Blige tune "One More Chance." As with all the other existing songs on Fresh Off the Boat, you don't hear "One More Chance" on network TV every day. That "One More Chance" remix is like "I've Got You Under My Skin" to a certain generation. It's that smooth of a song. I could easily imagine Tom Haverford and Donna Meagle ordering bottle service at the Snakehole Lounge to the sounds of "One More Chance" at one time or another. The airing of "Showdown at the Golden Saddle" last week was a stroke of beautiful timing too: yesterday was the date of Biggie's death.



If the show hadn't been able to nab almost all those hip-hop chestnuts that have appeared so far, Fresh Off the Boat would still soar anyway. The writing is frequently sharp (in her piece "Fresh Off the Boat uses black culture to talk more candidly about Asian culture," critic Danielle Henderson put the show's unique Asian American perspective best when she said, "I can't help but feel like Fresh Off the Boat is going to help another generation of kids feel like they're a little less alone"), and the cast, with Wu and Randall Park (as Eddie's dad Louis, whose Orlando steakhouse business is actually a Filipino fried chicken joint in Glendale) as the standouts, is an enticing collection of comedy nerd favorites (Park, Paul Scheer) and always-welcome serial guest stars (Ray Wise, C.S. Lee buried under a success perm wig). For a show that's another goddamn story about second-generation Asian Americans dealing with identity issues, assimilation and generational beefs, Fresh Off the Boat is far from stale.

Throwback Thursday: Hanna

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

Cate Blanchett is a terrific actress--I've enjoyed much of the Australian star's screen work ever since Elizabeth, the story of Fred Sanford's dead wife--but her attempt at a Southern accent in the 2011 teen assassin thriller Hanna is horrendous. British or Australian actors who mangle American accents have been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. The onslaught of these actors starring as American icons (Martin Luther King) or superheroes (the current Superman is a Brit, and so were the last cinematic Batman and the last pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe-era Spider-Man) is kind of worrisome because most of them really cannot do an American accent. The sight of many American roles in film and TV getting outsourced to white actors from other countries particularly bugs me because there are tons of Asian American or African American actors who are far better qualified at sounding American than those British or Aussie performers, and they're not getting those parts.

There's always one single word during a British or Aussie actor's performance as an American character that trips them up or brings their whole façade crashing down. Most often, that word is "anything." They tend to pronounce it as "en-nuh-thin"--Scottish star Karen Gillan's otherwise flawless American accent would slip during Selfie whenever she said "ennathin'"--instead of the American way: "en-nee-thing." During John Boyega's performance as a falsely accused American drone pilot on last summer's 24: Live Another Day, that word was "missile." Boyega pronounced it the U.K. way: "mis-eyel," as in making it rhyme with "aisle." The believability of Aussie actor Guy Pearce's performance as an ambitious '50s LAPD detective in L.A. Confidential was ruined at the very end of the film by Pearce's pronunciation of "Angeles" as "an-juh-lees"--a non-American way of saying it--instead of "an-juh-lehs." In Hanna, the word that trips up Blanchett is the movie's goddamn title! Her evil, 1998 Gillian Anderson-haired CIA agent character refers to the titular heroine she's chasing as "Hahn-uh." Yeah, that's not exactly the Southern way to pronounce it.

It's not like Blanchett can't do a Southern accent at all. She actually mastered it once before as a Georgia fortune teller with genuine psychic powers in the 2000 Sam Raimi thriller The Gift (dig the musicality Blanchett brings to the line where her psychic character, who's being threatened by a customer's scummy redneck husband, explains to her son why she's grabbed a baseball bat: "Don't worry, honey, I'm just working on my swing"). Blanchett shouldn't really be blamed for an accent that's so all over the map Google Maps would throw up its hands in frustration and mutter, "I fucking give up. You're on your own." The blame should fall on the dialect coach Hanna director Joe Wright hired for Blanchett. It's clearly not the same dialect coach who helped Blanchett speak during the filming of The Gift. The Hanna dialect coach should be kidnapped, locked in that punishment cabin from the summer camp in Addams Family Values and forced to watch Hillbilly Handfishin' on a loop. (And then the casting director who told Wright that it would be a good idea to hire the whitest actress to star as Tiger Lily in this summer's Pan should be dropped off in an Indian reservation and forced to live there without money and a smartphone for a month.)

Did they really need to make Agent Marissa Wiegler an American, along with all the other CIA agents in Hanna who are unconvincingly portrayed by British actors? It's not like everyone in that agency's personnel is American. There are foreigners who work there. Take, for example, the funniest CIA agent of them all: Avery Bullock, the deranged agency boss Patrick Stewart voices on American Dad. He's a Brit. I would have rather had seen Wright and screenwriters Seth Lochhead and David Farr shoehorn into Hanna some little backstory that Wiegler isn't American--like how Schwarzenegger flicks used to always squeeze in some dialogue about the hero's Austrian roots to explain what an American supercop is doing walking around with a thick Austrian accent--instead of the unintentionally funny attempt to pass Wiegler off as a Southerner. And that's not the only over-the-top and theatrical-sounding accent in Hanna. In fact, everyone in the film--who's not a member of the family of ordinary British tourists Hanna befriends while she's on the lam, that is--has a bizarre accent. There's the campy fake German accent Tom Hollander uses while he steals parts of the film as Wiegler's sadistic German associate Isaacs. But that accent somehow works. Meanwhile, Blanchett's campy fake Southern accent does not.

Her lousy accent fails to bring down a solid first action movie from a director who was previously known for period costume dramas like Atonement and Anna Karenina, just like how Wiegler fails to bring down this tough little German girl she wants to eliminate. Hanna is Saoirse Ronan's movie all the way, a remarkable coming-out party for the Atonement star's action side. Since Hanna, Ronan's starred in another art-house teen assassin flick, Violet & Daisy, and the Stephenie Meyer YA sci-fi adaptation The Host. Like in The Host, Ronan did all her own stunts as Hanna. She received martial arts training from legendary Bruce Lee protégé Dan Inosanto, and her verisimilitude as an action heroine--not once can you detect shitty CGI that pastes Ronan's eyebrowless face over some 42-year-old double's body--lends the film a certain edge and raggedy energy, whether she's leaping over shipping containers in an epic chase scene or simply snapping the pretty neck of Downton Abbey star Michelle Dockery, who briefly appears as one of Hanna's first human kills.

It's not just a strong physical performance. It's a really good dramatic one too. Ronan skillfully balances Hanna's fierce killing machine side with her vulnerable, innocent and curious child side. Wright frequently said he envisioned Hanna as a modern-day Grimm fairy tale--this one has an espionage backdrop and a dental hygiene-obsessed CIA scumbag as the evil witch--but I always interpreted Hanna as less of a fairy tale and more like an alien-on-Earth story a la The Iron Giant. Just replace the sentient robot soldier who discovers the wonders of Earth and decides that he doesn't want to be a gun with a home-schooled, feral and genetically engineered German teen who gets a taste of the world outside her wilderness classroom and realizes she wants no part of the kind of life her ex-CIA associate dad (Eric Bana, also working with a campy German accent) trained her for.

And how about that futuristic original score by the Chemical Brothers? It's like a fifth character in the movie, but it's definitely my favorite character, even more so than Hanna herself. The Hanna score, which can be heard during both "AFOS Prime" and the new AFOS espionage score music block "AFOS Incognito," is a remarkable aural achievement from a duo that never scored a film before. The tongue-in-cheek and creepy melody they wrote for Isaacs to whistle repeatedly--it's known on the score album as "The Devil Is in the Details"--is an all-time great villain theme.

Part of why the Chemical Brothers' propulsive score will stand the test of time is because the Chemical Brothers were simply allowed to be the Chemical Brothers, and they didn't acquiesce to the ubiquitous Inception foghorn from old Love Boat episodes--which was popular then and is still all over action film score music--or any other Hans Zimmer-esque flourish like the ones that are evidence of John Powell's roots as a member of Zimmer's Media Ventures collective during Powell's scores for the Bourne movies. Sure, the equally beloved Daft Punk/Joseph Trapanese score from 2010's Tron: Legacy contains some "BRAHM!," but it works for that video game-inspired gladiator movie. It wouldn't have worked for either Hanna or what the Chemical Brothers were aiming for, and that was to sound as alien as Hanna herself. "BRAHM!" would have stuck out like a really bad Southern accent.

Shows I Miss: Sounding Out the City

The Sounding Out the City podcast's city skyline key art is too boring as both an opening image and a visual representation of how killer and tasty many of the grooves were during the Sounding Out the City playlists, so this photo of a skyscraper rooftop pool party will have to do. (Photo source: meh.ro; photographer: Alexander Tikhomirov)

Since 2009, the AFOS blog's "Shows I Miss" series has focused on preserving the memory of entertaining TV shows that were gone too soon and were too clever to last on network TV, from 2003's Keen Eddie, starring Mark Valley as a New York cop in London and a then-unknown, pre-Layer Cake Sienna Miller, to the more recent Selfie, an Instagram-age reimagining of Pygmalion starring Karen Gillan and John Cho. Keen Eddie and Selfie happen to have three things in common: 1) an ability to juggle slapstick with pathos without causing viewers to suffer from tonal whiplash; 2) a final episode that hints that the love/hate relationship between the two leads, who never got to share a kiss, will blossom into something else after the end credits roll; and 3) a distinctive and pitch-perfect soundtrack.

Keen Eddie music supervisor Liz Gallacher, who went on to music-supervise Layer Cake (thanks to her, you'll never hear Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" again without thinking of the mayhem of Layer Cake) and Masters of Sex, picked the most un-Miami Vice-y tune for a drug raid sequence on Keen Eddie: the Archies' "Sugar Sugar." She came up with several other odd but somehow fitting existing song choices for Keen Eddie, while original score composer Daniel Ash, the former frontman for Love and Rockets, lent J.H. Wyman's irreverent fish-out-of-water show an appealing Brit-rock sheen. As for Selfie, which opened each episode with the amusingly titled original theme "I'm Looking at Me: Ballad of a Narcissus" by Jenny O. Kapnek and Selfie score composer Jared Faber, the sublime use of musical acts to define each Selfie character as much as their flamboyant fashion choices do was all the work of music supervisor Kasey Truman, who previously worked with Selfie showrunner Emily Kapnek on securing existing songs like Full Force's "Ain't My Type of Hype" for Kapnek's three-season wonder Suburgatory. Uptight Henry's idea of wilin' out is a Blues Traveler concert, while his cordial and outgoing boss Mr. Saperstein would, of course, be a fan of someone as smooth as Terence Trent D'Arby, the one part of Mr. Saperstein where David Harewood's Britishness shines through. The choice of TLC's "No Scrubs" as a way for Eliza and her previously unfriendly co-worker Charmonique to bond was also the work of Truman, as were Eliza's attempt to catch Henry's eye with the help of Wiz Khalifa's "We Dem Boyz" (it looks like John Cho is trying his damnedest not to laugh during Eliza's dorky sexy dancing scene in that office) and a much more serious karaoke party moment where Eliza belts out Sia's "Chandelier" in despair over Henry's refusal to take his friendship with her to another level (and Karen Gillan's otherwise well-hidden Scottish accent surfaces, especially when she sings the word "anything").

Music curating was also central to the first-ever entry in the continuing "Shows I Miss" series that's not a TV show: the half-hour Canadian podcast Sounding Out the City, which was at its most active from 2006 to 2009, a.k.a. the years before comedians not named Gervais forever changed podcasts and made them the more polished-sounding medium we know today. Sounding Out the City selector Driftwood, whose real name was Rob Fragoso, never got on the mic during his show, which appeared to have been named in tribute after the 2005 debut album by El Michels Affair, the Brooklyn retro-soul band that's best known for doing instrumental covers of Wu-Tang joints. Driftwood's podcast was closer to the DJ mixes that Okayplayer links to every Monday (and that I clog up too much of my MacBook hard drive with) than to a popular podcast that emerged during the '00s like the Gervais show or Coverville or a typical present-day podcast like WTF with Marc Maron, Comedy Bang Bang or StarTalk Radio. So without any interruption, save for the presence of sweepers like "Light on the attitude, heavy on the beat: Sounding Out the City" and "Beats, breaks, jazz, funk: Sounding Out the City," Driftwood would smoothly segue from classic breakbeat to lesser-known breakbeat to newly released retro-soul tune.

"I started out making mixes for myself to listen to during drives and subway rides. Somewhere along the way, I thought other people might enjoy the music in the mixes as much as I do, so I began posting them," wrote Driftwood in a podcast synopsis that's no longer online. There was nothing really extraordinary about Sounding Out the City. It was just a solid DJ mix podcast that any crate digger or beathead would enjoy. It also happened to be the first place where I encountered the likes of TOKiMONSTA and Mayer Hawthorne, as well as the first place where I heard--and fell in love with--the late Amy Winehouse's "Valerie," a cover of a Zutons tune she sang for producer Mark Ronson.

In the days before my phone took the place of my much larger-spaced but constantly malfunctioning iPod as my portable music player, I used to fill my iPod with mixes like the ones Driftwood assembled for Sounding Out the City. I managed to back up five Sounding Out the City episodes on a data CD before the demise of my PC wiped them out, and the reason why I'm bringing up the now-defunct podcast is because I rediscovered those episodes over the weekend while leafing through stacks of data CDs and cabinets full of mix CDs, hip-hop and R&B albums and pop soundtrack albums that were reserved for the now-defunct AFOS block "Rock Box," just to track down an audio file of Henry Mancini's "Something for Sophia" from the Arabesque soundtrack album, which I was thinking of adding to rotation for "AFOS Incognito."

Those five episodes are all I have of Driftwood's podcast, plus one information-less episode somebody preserved on YouTube. Out of all the unidentified bangers during that info-less Sounding Out the City episode on YouTube, I was only able to recognize a remix of Darondo's "Didn't I" at 29:45 and a remix of Mos Def, Q-Tip and Tash's "Body Rock" at 47:26. Unlike either Keen Eddie, which lives on in clips of raunchy Eddie/Moneypenny scenes and in its original and unedited form as full-episode bootlegs on YouTube, or Selfie, which is still streamable on Hulu and will probably remain there for a while unless Keen Eddie DVD-style music clearance issues force the show off Hulu, not a single trace of Sounding Out the City content remains online aside from that YouTube posting. That's due to both Driftwood completely disappearing from the Internet and the long-ago demise of the site that hosted his mp3s.

All that remains of Driftwood's digital footprint are an abandoned MySpace page where his profile pic is simply a pair of navy Adidas Gazelles and some episode playlist info depressingly surrounded by dead links. Shit, I really hate that I didn't save Driftwood's playlist info for my copy of the episode featuring Mos Def's "Twilite Speedball" because my search for the unknown artist who sang the really funky "Love for Sale" during that episode is leading me nowhere (the Wayback Machine failed to archive Driftwood's blog post about that episode, and not even Discogs has been helpful). And shit, shit, shit, I really want to hear the film score music-heavy Sounding Out the City episode where Ocean's Thirteen score cues like "Shit! Shit! Shit!," which can be heard during the AFOS morning block "Beat Box" and "AFOS Prime," were joined on the playlist by both "The Riot" from Fritz the Cat, which can be heard during "Beat Box" and the AFOS animation score music block "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," and Mighty Ryeders' "Evil Vibrations." I don't know what Driftwood is up to these days, but if it weren't for him, my train rides to and from work in 2007 wouldn't have sounded as amazing.

Shows I Miss (Already): Selfie (with guest blogger Adam from Slant Eye for the Round Eye)

There are several things I'm going to miss about the short-lived Selfie, a hashtag-era reimagining of Pygmalion that has been rescued from post-cancellation limbo by Hulu and will finish out on Hulu the rest of its 13-episode run, starting today. They include the genuine chemistry between Karen Gillan as narcissistic pharmaceutical sales chick Eliza Dooley and John Cho as her marketing guru co-worker Henry Higgs and the rare and groundbreaking sight of an Asian American male as a romantic lead on a single-camera comedy that's not a YouTube show. Cho's Harold & Kumar franchise has been putting Asian American guys in romantic lead roles for three consecutive movies and an upcoming Adult Swim animated version now. It took 10 goddamn years for prime-time network TV to catch up to Harold & Kumar.

I'll also miss any scene where Gillan dances (especially to Wiz Khalifa) and that wig Gillan has to wear as Eliza (after Gillan had all her hair shaved off to play a bald alien warrior in Guardians of the Galaxy) somehow stays on; that little kid whose sobs sound like Eddie Murphy laughing; and the solid character writing and visual panache shepherded by Suburgatory and Selfie creator/showrunner Emily Kapnek, the Frank Tashlin of single-camera comedies. Like Tashlin, Kapnek started out in animation, which explains the strong visual sense she brought to both Suburgatory's first two seasons (before a huge budget slash really affected that show) and Selfie.

Kapnek's Nickelodeon background--I often forget that Nick nurtured Hey Arnold! and Dora the Explorer, kids' shows with lead characters of color--also explains the incredible diversity of the worlds of Suburgatory and Selfie, both casting-wise and music-wise. The huge amount of interracial couples on Suburgatory and Selfie nicely reflects the world outside the TV screen, and I'll always adore Kapnek for soundtracking a Suburgatory scene at a house party with Full Force's "Ain't My Type of Hype" from House Party.

But there's one thing none of the few TV critics who have been in Selfie's corner have noticed about the show, and I think I might miss this element most of all: the pause-button-worthy attention to detail in the show's cutaways to screen shots of social media. Those screen shots were dead-on about the dumb or vacuous things that are often said in comments sections and on social media feeds.

Henry Higgs' off-screen mom is every single Asian immigrant parent who stupidly parrots Republican bullshit, and I love how Selfie captured that in its Facebook screen shots. So of course, like any other non-stereotypical and genuinely funny show that nails a little aspect or two of Asian American life like that and doesn't feel like it was written by aliens from outer space who studied only clips of Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles or Fisher Stevens in brownface from Short Circuit on their spaceship viewscreen and think this is how all us Asian guys behave, Selfie gets cancelled.

What will you miss about Selfie, Adam? Take it away.--JJA

***

It Was Just a Good Show
By Adam Chau

Above everything else, I just liked "Selfie." It was warm, cute, funny--I knew what to expect (from a general POV) and each week it was something I started looking forward to. It was one of those shows where I could feel myself getting more invested because at it's core, I related to it. I laughed with it. I talked to the TV when I watched it. Say what you might about how they got some things wrong--I think they got a lot more right.

It's like the title. People have talked about the title of the show as being a part of it's downfall but how was that any worse than "The League" or "7th Heaven" or "Ally McBeal"? I'll argue that maybe it was a better title than people credited because it was too close to their faces. It's like the underground rapper that gets signed by a major label, or who's song you start hearing more of on the radio and start seeing on television. Are they any less artistic just because more people started to like them? It's easy to write "Selfie" off as a pop-culture-in-the-now-epm style title but when you think about why we do it, the overall arc of picture taking in general, and then what we do with them in the connected world from a larger social networking perspective with more connections and more spheres of influence--it stood on it's own.

I think that's the thing that gets me the most about the cancelling of "Selfie" is that it just wasn't appreciated and it could have been a great hit--for someone. Maybe not for ABC. But for someone. Because we loved Eliza. We loved Henry. They weren't perfect. They had their quirks. But so do we. And that's why we watch. Because we can relate. Because we've all jumped in the lake, or wanted to, at least once in our lives, or did the occasional "Hmm...I wonder what they're up to now..." searches and from that POV "Selfie" really did offer storylines that multiple different groups could relate to. I'll miss that piece of the show where I'm not just watching something that interests me or keeps my attention, but that also references some of my everyday life (versus something like "Storage Wars" which I occasionally like to watch but that has nothing to do with my daily life).

But "Selfie" did.

And absolutely, I will lament not being able to watch a show with John Cho as the lead because he's just a good actor who I like to watch on the screen, big or small. Almost every year he's in a new movie while at the same time also working in television. It's not just me. Other people like him too, and he was a recognizable face that anchored the show for millions of people that tuned in.

Yeah.

I'll miss that.

Minnesotan blogger Adam Chau runs Slant Eye for the Round Eye and contributes posts to YOMYOMF (pronounced "yawm-yawm-eff").