TELEVISION
IMMIGRANTS FOUNDED Hollywood (Eastern Europeans named Mayer and Zukor and Laemmle), but you can count the TV shows about them on two hands— and for a long time, not even on one hand. At the dawn of TV, you had a Cuban named Ricky on I Love Lucy. Then decades of white suburban families named Bunker and Brady and Bundy. Occasionally, a black family would bust through the Caucasian clutter—the Evans family of Good Times, the Jeffersons, the Huxtables, the Johnsons of Black-ish—but immigrant families? It wasn’t until 1994 that a show was built around such a family. That sitcom, All-American Girl, starred Margaret Cho as the daughter of Korean-born parents. It lasted one season. The George Lopez show, which began in 2002, hung around for six.
Here we are in 2017, with roughly 48 million immigrants in this country, and we have a grand total of four shows featuring immigrant families: the CW’s Jane the Virgin (Hispanic daughter of an immigrant mother), Netflix’s Cuban-American reboot of One Day at a Time, Aziz Ansari’s Master of None and Fresh Off the Boat, based on celebrity chef Eddie Huang’s eponymous memoir, which debuted on ABC in 2015. The fictional version of his Taiwanese family is navigating life in Orlando, Florida, where Tiger mom Jessica (Constance Wu) and husband Louis (Randall Park) own a steakhouse, Cattleman’s Ranch, while raising three sons.