Over the last few decades, American television and film have opened up, so much so that my colleague Esther Breger recently argued that TV is more diverse than it’s ever been. But the one group that’s still notably absent is Asian Americans. The Asian-American family hasn’t been the subject of a sitcom since Margaret Cho’s “All-American Girl” was canceled after disastrous reviews 20 years ago.

Critics are now looking ahead to ABC’s family sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat,” debuting this spring. Based on celebrity chef Eddie Huang’s memoirs, the show should go a long toward representing the 18 million Asian Americans who are virtually invisible in mainstream media. But it remains to be seen if the show can be as groundbreaking as many hope; it’s already received criticism for its title (which most would recognize as an offensive term for Asian immigrants).

The struggle for Asian-American representation on network television, though, doesn’t mean it’s impossible to effectively capture the immigrant experience. Though set across the pond, British indie film, Lilting, which premiered this fall, covers the immigrant reality in a way that should both resonate with Asian Americans and pull back the curtain for white audiences.

While other minority groups also suffer from stereotyping and underrepresentation on TV, blacks and Latinos appear more frequently, at least in recent seasons (see shows like “Jane the Virgin,” “Orange is the New Black,” “Blackish”). “All-American Girl”remains to date the only attempt to depict Asian-American family life on TV, and it failed spectacularly. It was canceled after one season, and almost the entire cast had been fired by the time the finale aired. The show’s producers actually asked star Margaret Cho to act “more Asian”—and brought in an Asian expert to coach her.

If represented at all, Asian American characters find their identity either fetishized or ignored completely. There is no middle ground. Shows like “Selfie”or “The Mindy Project” are essentially race blind; the characters just happen to be Asian Americans who live and interact in very white worlds. But, as E. Alex Jung recently put it in the LA Review of Books, the problem with these shows is: “Taking the ‘Asian’ out of Asian American doesn’t make its characters more American, but less so.”