Fresh Off The Boat Season 1 Review

Fresh Off The Boat succeeds in showing fleeting glimpses at comedic timing, especially in split-second moments that see young Evan sent as a “representative” to the block party meetings, gossiping and vetoing various elaborate requests by other housewives, but you can practically hear the gears grinding behind the screen as the plot progresses. Jessica befriends Honey, Popular Women hate Honey, Jessica shuns Honey, Jessica feels bad, Jessica denies Popular Women and wins Honey back with friendship ballad. Is it too late to just have a show about the two kids?

It’s admirable in its attempts to put a neglected race in prime-time, to force a bit of a mirror up to the stereotypes and misunderstood nature most people may have about families like this. But did it have to be this mirror? Sure, build a joke about how Eddie’s straight A’s aren’t good enough for Jessica, but do something with it. There’s no soul here, no cleverness, nothing beyond simply pointing out that in a roomful of parents worried about their kids getting high on a sticker drug, it’s funny how the one Asian mom wants to know when report cards are coming out.

That joke focuses on a room where everyone is concerned about something meaningful and only the Huangs are worried about something a little less so, but it should have been the other way around. Make it a report card meeting where only the Huangs actually care about grades and everyone else is preoccupied with planning a meaningless social gathering, like a dance. Shows like Suburgatory (which definitely had its own problems), found particular success in a similar structure.

Fresh Off The Boat knows this, and indulges occasionally in scenes where – shocker – the two youngest kids show up and confuse Jessica with their new school’s byzantine grading system, but ignores it everywhere else. The series engineers the Huangs as the butt of nearly all of its jokes, making them come off as unlikeable and abrasive, when far more comedic fodder could have been mined, and more sympathetic characters built, from making their new surroundings and the idiots in them said joke butts.

There just doesn’t feel like much thought or commentary went behind it, which is shockingly disappointing coming from the fact that Nahnatchka Khan wrote the first two episodes, and executive produces the series. She’s worked on Malcolm in the Middle, American Dad!, and, most impressively, created the canceled-all-too-soon Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment 23. She, and Eddie Huang himself, brings none of that show’s charm, wit, or dizzying downpour of jokes to the new series.

Fresh Off The Boat isn’t offensive, but neither does it represent a new wave of Asian-Americans in the medium, or appear to be even trying to. It has a brave idea to focus on a lesser-represented race in popular television, but totally blinks first in shoving its occasionally likeable characters and promising premise down the throat of a profoundly predictable sitcom. They, and its viewers, deserve better.