But “Warrior” has competing agendas that keep distracting you from the action. One is completely understandable: the framework of racism and racial oppression, which is omnipresent from the opening scene when Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) gets off the boat in San Francisco and beats up three dockyard “bulls” who are pushing around the arriving Chinese. What’s justified or necessary from a historical standpoint, though, can get monotonous in dramatic terms when it’s presented in ham-handed and obvious ways. (“Strange, the way you talk. If I closed my eyes, you could be anyone.”)

And there’s a cognitive dissonance between the show’s racial consciousness and some of its more Cinemax-friendly attributes, like the constant nudity of Asian actresses. (Conveniently, one of the primary settings is a brothel.) Two female characters, Ah Toy (Olivia Cheng) and Mai Ling (Dianne Doan), have been empowered in ways far beyond anything the handful of Chinese women in 19th-century San Francisco would have experienced. And yet every speaking role for a Chinese woman is a prostitute, a madam or a concubine, and even the lead actresses dutifully shed their clothes, as if paying a Cinemax tax.

And the Cinemaxness of it all shouldn’t be a surprise, since “Warrior” — a project pushed by Lee’s daughter, Shannon, and the director Justin Lin — is primarily the work of the writer and producer Jonathan Tropper, whose previous series, the small-town noir “Banshee,” ran on the channel for four seasons. “Warrior” shares some of the propulsiveness and energy of that show but lacks its conviction and its sense of place, in part because of the artificiality of the antique San Francisco recreated on elaborate South African sets.

You can see the broad, pulp-fiction outlines of the story Tropper has set up. Ah Sahm and Mai Ling, star-crossed brother and sister on opposite sides of the Tong war, will have an eventual reckoning, and Ah Sahm and Leary (Dean Jagger), the monstrous Irish labor agitator, will eventually square off. But the show is weighed down with subplots among its white characters in the police force and city hall — one senator is trotted onscreen once in a while to make an ominous reference to the Chinese exclusion act he’s sponsoring — and characters we care about, like Cheng’s formidable brothel owner Ah Toy, aren’t given enough to do.

Koji, an actor of Japanese and British descent who hasn’t been seen much in America, is effective in the fight scenes, and there’s a sense of humor in his reactions and inflections that grows on you as the season goes along. He’s a little short on Lee-like charisma, though, and that stands out, because one thing “Warrior” has no lack of is charismatic Asian actors: Hoon Lee as a Chinatown fixer, Jason Tobin of Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow” as a tong heir and the action star Joe Taslim of “The Raid” as a leader of a rival gang.