A few weeks ago, the Asian-American family sitcom Fresh off the Boat aired an episode that was a surprisingly meta commentary on the pressure that comes with being the only Asian-American sitcom on television. In the episode, Louis (Randall Park), the family patriarch, is invited to visit a local morning show to promote his restaurant on television, where he performs a few of his signature celebrity impersonations, leaving the two hosts and audience members in stitches. His wife, Jessica (Constance Wu), is furious at him for embodying a stereotype like Sixteen Candles' infamously cartoonish and offensive Long Duk Dong. Louis, haunted by memories of his peers' treatment of him because of Long Duk Dong's portrayal, returns to the studio, completely poker faced, to lecture “Good Morning Orlando” viewers on racism, which understandably causes the studio to ban him from the show and leads to another lecture from Jessica.

Fresh off the Boat aired January this year as a mid-season replacement to ABC's line of shows. John Cho's Selfie and Mindy Kaling's The Mindy Project, the only other two broadcast shows headlined by Asian-American actors, had just been cancelled. The last Asian-American family sitcom, Margaret Cho's All-American Girl, was axed after one season due to poor ratings, twenty years ago.

As the only remaining show prominently featuring Asian-American actors and the Asian-American experience, Fresh off the Boat faced tremendous pressure ahead of its premiere to not only succeed, but to be the perfect television representation of Asian America. Much like Louis on “Good Morning Orlando”, Fresh off the Boat had to be funny, but not too comical; respectable, but not too serious. So when Jessica repeatedly admonished Louis for not being funny, interesting, pleasant, tall, and serious in equal parts, the show was talking about itself. Because Fresh off the Boat is the only Asian-American sitcom, it has been and still is expected to represent every facet of the Asian-American experience on its own.

The premiere of the first two episodes (bisected by Modern Family) turned in massive ratings, and even after the show moved to a terrible Tuesday evening timeslot, its viewership held more or less steady. Critics loved the show, and in particular, Constance Wu's portrayal of the charmingly witty and dotingly strict matriarch of the family. It resonated well with most Asian-Americans that I knew, with storylines particular to the Asian-American experience but familiar to all Americans.

It proved that millions of Americans were willing to, every Tuesday evening, invite an Asian-American family into their living rooms. It didn't matter that they ate long noodles instead of cakes on birthdays, it only mattered that they were funny and interesting people who you wanted to hang out with. It achieved what Louis couldn't on “Good Morning Orlando”: it managed to please everyone (except Eddie Huang). And it proved that Asian-American stories can generate a profit.

On the heels of Fresh off the Boat's success came this year's 2015-2016 television season, complete with the most diverse cast of minority actors in my memory. Last year, I wrote that “Hollywood is currently on the fence over how it should depict Asian-American characters in the future.” At the time, there were two types of Asian characters on TV when they were depicted at all: relateable, dependable, and realistically portrayed characters like Glenn from The Walking Dead, or the walking stereotype that is Han Lee from the dumbfoundingly popular 2 Broke Girls. In the 2014-2015 television season, I believe both types of characters were represented in equal numbers on the small screen. Following Fresh off the Boat's success this year, the tide has shifted in favor of a positive and nuanced Asian-American character.

More importantly, there are now more Asian-American characters on television than ever:

This year, we saw the introduction of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's Dong (Ki Hong Lee), a character with surprising depth and sweetness and a quietly subversive name (“In Vietnamese Kimmy means penis!”), and watched Lori Tan Chinn's Mei Chang emerge from the background in Orange is the New Black.

Netflix also introduced us to Aziz Ansari's latest project, Master of None, a brilliant semi-biographical and uniquely nuanced exploration of millienial life. In one episode, Dev (Ansari), along with his best friend Brian (Kelvin Yu), invite their parents to dinner in order to hear their parents' immigrant stories. Another episode wonders about the lack of Indian-Americans on television through Dev's navigations within a structurally racist Hollywood.

When Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun) supposedly “died” on The Walking Dead, the internet collectively freaked out. I do not remember a single instance in the past where an Asian character's death (or anything about a fictional Asian-American character in general) generated so much discussion among fans and the mainstream media, pointing to the showrunners' long running positive treatment of his character as a relateable and visible protagonist, rather than being sidelined to the background.

Most surprising to me was The Man in the High Castle's treatment of its Japanese-American characters. The story is set in an alternate America where the Axis Powers won World War II and occupied the States. Rather than depicting the Japanese “occupiers” as one-dimensionally immoral monsters, the show takes care to depict them as individuals, and in one case, the brutally discomfiting way dominant cultures treat subdued ones: with reverence and interest, but merely as museum trinkets.

Introduced as one-dimensional antagonist whose sole purpose was to arrest the show's main characters, Inspector Tido (Joel de la Fuente) successfully gains the audience's sympathy by the end of the series. One of the best parts of the show is Cary-Hirouki Tagawa's Trade Minister Nobusoke Tagomi, a simple and sympathetic man swept up in conspiracies to prevent a nuclear war between Japan and Germany. This show's ability to portray every person – including its Japanese characters – with depth and well-intentioned motives is masterful.

Does this mean that the Asian-American experience is mainstream? Not at all, but for television at least, this season represents an incredible leap forward. Take Dr. Ken for instance, a new Asian-American sitcom introduced this fall headlined by Community's Ken Jeong. According to Jeong, without the burden of being the first Asian-American sitcom in two decades, it could be whatever it wanted to be. It could be a stupidly silly show (it is) and still fly under the radar with a full-season pickup.

This is why more Asian-American characters on television is important. Writers are now free to depict Asians as individuals, rather than struggling to write the perfect character to please everyone or a stereotype for cheap jokes. Surely there is an accented Vietnamese-American delivery boy in New York City named 'Dong'. He deserves to have his story told on television just as much as the fully-assimilated and unaccented second-generation Asian-American named 'Mike'.

In years past, characters such as Dong and Dr. Ken would be stereotypes: comic reliefs with funny-sounding names and faces. But now, their characters are treated with respect and represent only a portion of Asian-Americans on TV. These characters no longer singly define Asian America to the mainstream audience. Asian-Americans are a diverse lot, and the opportunity to finally see their various stories individually portrayed across multiple shows is the gift that Fresh off the Boat gave us last year.

On a more personal note, I am currently residing in China, where locals react with surprise and confusion when they learn that I identify as “American”. To them, “American” means blue eyed, white skinned, because all of the Americans they see on TV look like that. Media representation matters. But this year's introduction of so many new, different, and individually compelling Asian-American characters is hopefully beginning to change all of that.

I look forward to seeing next year's crop of shows featuring strong Asian casts such as Eat Pray Thug, Pre-Madonna, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and I Love Lakshmi. I hope that Asian-American babies born in 2015 will have the opportunity to grow up seeing their faces, their stories, and their experiences represented on television as part of the American story.