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“THE ONLY ASIAN GUY ON THE SHOW”
Around five decades ago, Bruce Lee came up with the eight-page TV treatment, but his story of an itinerant martial artist in the Old West never made it to the small screen. In 1972, a Warner Bros. TV show debuted on ABC: It was called Kung Fu and it was about a man with prodigious martial arts skills who wandered around the 19th century American West. Over the years, people have pointed out similarities between the TV premise Lee dreamed up in his proposal and Kung Fu.
“If you ask my mother, she will say it’s based on my father’s idea,” Shannon Lee said. “Yet if you ask anyone at Warner Bros., they will say that they had come up with that idea first.”
Though there is some dispute about whether Lee’s ideas influenced what evolved into Kung Fu, there’s no doubt about one fact: When the drama arrived on TV, a white man, David Carradine, played the show’s lead character, who had a Chinese mother and a white American father. Though Bruce Lee was considered for the role, the actor didn’t get it. According to a 2018 Bruce Lee biography, Warner Bros. executive Tom Kuhn worried about Lee’s accent, and is quoted as saying that none of the Asian actors who auditioned “really measured up.”
If her father had sold and starred in the TV drama he had wanted to make, “he probably would have been the only Asian guy on the show,” Shannon Lee noted.
Even now, actors of Asian descent aren’t often cast as the leads in American TV and films (although a gender-flipped version of Kung Fu is in the works at the CW). As was the case with Marvel’s misbegotten Iron Fist, they tend to play the sidekicks of a white lead, and the storytelling rarely revolves around them: “There might be a special episode where they go to Chinatown or Koreatown, and that’s it,” said Jeff Yang, who writes opinion pieces for CNN and cohosts the podcast They Call Us Bruce.
“The unfortunate thing for Asian American actors is so often, because people haven’t seen it, they don’t envision it,” director Lulu Wang told Vanity Fair’s Rebecca Sun for a feature on veteran actor and Mulan star Tzi Ma. “They’re like, ‘I’ve written this for Bill Murray, so we’re going to go look for somebody who looks like Bill Murray.’ Well, why not imagine Tzi?… His face is so expressive. He’s able to do so much with so little, and there’s humor in his eyes as well as pathos. I refer to him as the Asian Bill Murray, because he can make you laugh just by sitting there. Just because you haven’t seen him in a certain type of role in the past, doesn’t mean that you can’t be the one to create that for him.”
Jason Tobin as Young Jun and Andrew Koji as Ah Sahm.BY DAVID BLOOMER/CINEMAX.
Despite the “peak TV” explosion of the past decade, getting projects with majority-Asian casts off the ground can still be an uphill battle in this country, at least going by the challenging journey that Warrior went on before it landed at Cinemax. Lin recalled that when he and Lee were pitching Warrior around Hollywood a few years ago, he got the distinct impression it would have been an easier sell—and the show might have gotten a bigger budget—if the story had had a white protagonist or storytelling “lens.”
“When it comes to a commitment to [spending] tens of millions of dollars, people can talk about inclusion and diversity, but they also tend to be very conservative,” Lin said. “When we presented the fact that we wanted to have all these three-dimensional Asian American characters, there was a price point, you know?”
But, as Tropper said, the Asian characters were always “the purpose of the show.” To that end, Warrior employs an unusual strategy regarding language: While the drama cleverly acknowledges that their first language is Cantonese, Chinese characters on Warrior usually speak to each other in unaccented English, complete with epithets and casual slang.
“I remember in season one, Henry Yuk, who played [tong leader] Long Zii, said to me, ‘Jonathan, I really want to thank you for a role where I get to use pronouns,’” Tropper recalled. “Because he was often cast as the wise old Chinese man who would speak in broken English.”
ONE PARAGRAPH IN THE HISTORY BOOK
Warrior thankfully avoids the laborious tone that some historical dramas are saddled with; instead, it breathes vivid life into aspects of America’s past that many remain unaware of. “I remember growing up with U.S. history and taking a class, and if you were lucky, [the book] had a paragraph about the Chinese American experience and the railroads,” Lin said.
Jason Tobin as Young Jun.BY DAVID BLOOMER/CINEMAX.
Filling in those gaps is especially important right now, because the 19th century of Warrior looks a lot like the year 2020. “A lot of the racial politics, a lot of the identity-building of America, was framed in part in opposition to Chinese Americans and Asian Americans and Asian immigration,” said Michelle K. Sugihara, executive director of Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE). “That kernel has never really gone away.”
Warrior doesn’t shy away from depicting violence against Chinese immigrants—or the kinds of political machinations that resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And though Warrior is clear-eyed about how racist policies and attitudes were deployed by some white people of all classes, Tropper noted that the goal was not to make “a comic book” in which the Chinese characters are virtuous and white folks are the villains.
“We really tried to contextualize the issues,” Tropper said. And indeed, both seasons of the drama demonstrate how different races were often intentionally pitted against each other by the powerful.
According to Yang, “this is actually the very moment that a show like Warrior deserves to be a part of. It could act as a vaccination against the other problem we’re facing—the pandemic of xenophobia and hostility towards Asians that has come along with COVID.”
DONE IN BY THE STREAMING WARS—OR NOT?
Unfortunately, in the wake of AT&T’s acquisition of what is now known as WarnerMedia, Cinemax appears to be an afterthought; the network, which requires a subscription of its own, is no longer making original series, and the Wall Street Journal reported recently that its subscriber base is shrinking.
Kieran Bew as Officer “Big Bill” O’Hara.BY DAVID BLOOMER/CINEMAX.
Why wasn’t season one of Warrior—and other well-regarded Cinemax originals like Banshee and The Knick—made available on HBO Max when the streaming platform debuted in May? Lin said that when he inquired about Warrior’s possible migration from Cinemax to HBO Max, he said he was told the drama “didn’t fit the brand.”
Business considerations may have been involved, but according to an insider familiar with the inner workings of WarnerMedia, the primary explanation for the lack of Cinemax fare on HBO Max comes down to indifference from the executive team that, until recently, ran the streamer. But in August, a corporate reshuffling saw the exit of several top executives and the promotion of HBO’s president of programming, Casey Bloys, who now oversees content for the streamer as well.
After Bloys’s promotion, a WarnerMedia source said that the existing seasons of Warrior will be made available on HBO, thus accessible on HBO Max. That will happen after the second season of Warrior airs on Cinemax, and it’s not clear whether other Cinemax originals will also get added to the company’s marquee streaming platform.
Unfortunately, a third season of Warrior looks quite unlikely. The show’s cast and creative team have dispersed, and though Tropper said there were conversations with Netflix about moving the show to that platform, that didn’t pan out. Still, Lee said the news of the drama’s eventual move to a bigger platform was “encouraging.”
“That would be incredible,” added Tropper. “Warrior is a unique and timely show that I think, now more than ever, would find a significant viewership on major platforms like HBO and HBO Max.”
The promise of the streaming era is that there is a place for everyone. Warrior’s devoted fans are about to find out if that’s actually true.
I’m doing some work for Den of Geek on this so Cinemax has shared Season 2 screeners with me.
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