ABC Launches “Fresh Off The Boat” Inspired by Eddie Huang

FRESH OFF THE BOAT

ABC’s new half hour comedy “Fresh Off the Boat”, inspired by Eddie Huang’s best-selling memoir by the same name, “Fresh Off the Boat” was sampled twice in ABC’s Wednesday night comedy block on WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4 at both 8:30 and 9:31 p.m., followed by its time slot premiere on TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10 (8:00-8:30 p.m., ET).

It’s 1995 and 11-year-old hip-hop loving Eddie Huang (Hudson Yang) has just moved with his family from Chinatown in Washington D.C. to suburban Orlando. They quickly discover things are very different there. Orlando doesn’t even have a Chinatown — unless you count the Huang house. Eddie’s dad, Louis (Randall Park), has dragged the family to the ‘burbs to pursue his version of the American dream, opening Cattleman’s Ranch Steakhouse, a struggling western-themed restaurant. Louis thinks that the best way to get customers in the door is to hire a white host to greet them and make them feel comfortable. Eddie’s mom, Jessica (Constance Wu), has agreed to the move, but she finds Orlando a strange place — from the rollerblading stay-at-home moms, to the hospital-like grocery stores, to the fact that the humidity has ruined her hair.

Inspired by Eddie Huang’s true story, “Fresh Off the Boat” stars Randall Park as Louis, Constance Wu as Jessica, Hudson Yang as Eddie, Forrest Wheeler as Emery and Ian Chen as Evan. Eddie Huang provides The Voice over narration.

“Fresh Off the Boat” was written by Nahnatchka Khan, who also serves as executive producer. Jake Kasdan and Melvin Mar are executive producers, and Eddie Huang is producer. The series is produced by 20th Century Fox Television.

Eddie Huang said, I didn’t understand how network television, the one-size fits-all antithesis to Fresh Off the Boat, was going to house the voice of a futuristic chinkstronaut. I began to regret ever selling the book, because Fresh Off the Boat was a very specific narrative about SPECIFIC moments in my life, such as kneeling in a driveway holding buckets of rice overhead or seeing pink nipples for the first time.

The network’s approach was to tell a universal, ambiguous, cornstarch story about Asian-Americans resembling moo goo gai pan written by a Persian-American who cut her teeth on race relations writing for Seth MacFarlane. But who is that show written for? We all know that universal demographic doesn’t exist; even at the level of the person, the network’s ideal viewer doesn’t exist, much less know what it wants. This universal market of Jos. A. Bank customers watches cornstarch television and eats at Panda Express because that’s all they’re being offered. I didn’t need the show to be Baohaus or Din Tai Fung; I would have settled for Chipotle. Yet, for some reason, no one wants to improve the quality of offerings until someone forces them to. A Jedi has to say, “I want to be incrementally better than the Seth MacFarlanes and McDonald’s of the world!” for anything to change. Isn’t that the genius of Shake Shack, South Park, and In-N-Out Burger? What happened to being an incrementally aspirational society? Wasn’t America the City on the Hill? In Hollywood, it felt like, we were the town in a valley run by western Michigan. (http://www.vulture.com/2015/01/eddie-huang-fresh-off-the-boat-abc.html)