The notion of “belonging” can be an abstract one, so the particular wisdom of Fresh Off the Boat’s latest episode was connecting it to a physical sense of place—something another fall sitcom, NBC’s The Good Place, has also done recently, if by more philosophical and subtle means. Capturing this tension between identity and location was so crucial to Fresh Off the Boat’s creators and producers that they shot “Coming From America” on location in Taiwan—the first time a U.S. network show has filmed in Asia. The decision helped with authenticity, but also with storytelling: It’s easier for viewers of different backgrounds to empathize with Jessica and Louis’s internal identity crisis when they can actually see all the specific ways in which the couple no longer fit in.

In Louis’s case, his feeling of estrangement from his home is embodied by relationship with his brother, Gene (Ken Jeong), who stayed in Taiwan instead of moving to America. Louis’s view of himself as a success story who’s achieved the American dream is deflated by his brother’s comparative wealth. (In one exchange, his youngest son asks, “Dad, are we poor?” “What? No. American middle-class is like Taiwan rich, ” Louis explains, to which his middle son replies, “I’d rather be Taiwan rich!”) But Louis eventually expresses regret about his decision to leave Taiwan and the advantages, connections, and social capital he had there. As he tells Gene: “We’re the white people of here.” The trip only throws into relief for Louis the vastly different social statuses Taiwan and America each confers on him; who he is depends a great deal on where he is.

Even when the Huangs were back in Orlando, Fresh Off the Boat explored the concept of competing identities, as well as the myriad small ways the family’s race made them stand out in a mostly white suburban community. In season one, the show’s young protagonist Eddie (Hudson Yang) was briefly paired by his school with a new Chinese-Jewish student, Phillip Goldstein, because they were both Asian—despite the fact that they had nothing else in common. The season-two episode “Good Morning Orlando” found Louis struggling with the burden of being a good representative for all Asian people when he was given the rare chance to appear on a local talk show. After agonizing over the “right” way to present himself, he finally acknowledged, “One person can’t be everything.” But Tuesday’s “Coming From America” marked the show’s most direct effort to portray the Huangs as being stuck between two cultures.

Like Fresh Off the Boat, The Good Place also has ideas of belonging, geography, and identity baked into its premise. The sitcom takes place in a nondenominational heaven and centers on Eleanor (Kristen Bell), who accidentally ended up there despite a lifetime of misdeeds and is trying to become a better person to earn her place. But the character whose situation has most relevance to the Huangs is Jianyu (Manny Jacinto), who’s introduced in the pilot as a Buddhist monk who’s taken a vow of silence. After almost three full episodes of not speaking and placid nodding,“Jianyu” is revealed to actually be Jason Mendoza: a slightly dim amateur DJ who loves EDM, sold fake drugs to college kids, and hails from Jacksonville, Florida. He, like Eleanor, ended up in The Good Place by mistake, only his not-belonging has another dimension from the start. “Everyone here thinks I’m Taiwanese. I’m Filipino,” Jason told Eleanor after confiding in her his true identity. “That’s racist. Heaven is so racist.”