Fresh Off the Boat

When I first started seeing ads for this new ABC sitcom I groaned. The stereotypes conjured by the title alone - "Fresh Off the Boat" - were enough to steer most sensible folks away from this one. Me? I had to see this train wreck, and I was glad I did, and not for the reasons I thought I would be.

I thought I'd see a nightmare mash-up of bad stereotypes but instead I got a rather smart sitcom about growing up ethnic in the 1990s, with a surprisingly fresh hip hop sensibility. In that period memoir of the same name by chef Eddie Huang.

piece vibe, "Fresh Off the Boat" is also comparable to "The Goldbergs," and that's a good thing. And thankfully its origins are not in a boardroom but the blog and

The bad news is this is still a network sitcom and only occasionally funny, and it's difficult to get past the father's role as Kim Jung-Un in The Interview. Still, I dug it, and it's much better than it has any right to be. If the network would let it get just a bit more edgy, this could awesome.