With the critically acclaimed US show now on in the UK, its creators explain how it is more a thank-you letter to immigrant parents than a traditional comedy

Set in 1995, and based loosely on the memoir of Viceland TV chef Eddie Huang, Fresh Off the Boat is about the fictionalised Huangs, a family of Taiwanese-Americans who move from Washington DC’s Chinatown to a mostly white neighbourhood in Orlando, Florida, so dad Louis can open a cowboy-themed steakhouse.

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First airing in the states in 2015, it was the first US network TV show about an Asian-American family since Margaret Cho’s short-lived All-American Girl in 1994. As for the UK, even if we admit all Asian-diaspora sitcoms into the category, it still sits alongside Citizen Khan and The Kumars at No 42 in a tiny handful. There have, of course, been Asian characters in other shows – including, unusually, an Asian male love interest in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – but nothing quite like Fresh Off the Boat, with its 90s hip-hop references and acutely observed relationships.

Creator and showrunner Nahnatchka Khan says the important difference is the perspective: “It’s told from the inside out, meaning the Huangs are always the ones who are telling the story, not the ones being looked at in a fish bowl and pointed at … They’re not like the funny neighbour or the weird guy at work.”

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If Fresh Off the Boat’s delay in reaching British screens has one significant benefit, it’s that we’re getting to it at a triumphant point when the critics have already been proved wrong. Chief among them was Eddie Huang himself, the man whose life story inspired the show’s creation and on whom the central character, 11-year-old hip-hop obsessive Eddie, was modelled. In a New York Magazine piece published shortly before the show premiered, Huang described the medium of network television as “the one-size fits-all antithesis” to the specific and authentic story of his book. He also sharply dismissed the show itself as “a universal, ambiguous, cornstarch story about Asian-Americans resembling moo goo gai pan [an Americanised version of a Cantonese dish] written by a Persian-American who cut her teeth on race relations writing for Seth MacFarlane.”

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That “Persian-American” would be Khan, whose previous credits include a stint on the MacFarlane-co-created American Dad! as well as creating the cancelled-too-soon Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. “Yeah, [Eddie Huang] hasn’t been around in a couple of seasons,” she says evenly when asked about his ongoing relationship with the show. “He did the voiceover in season one and then that was it.” In the meantime, the writing team that Khan heads up has become concerned less with remaining loyal to Huang’s original vision and more with developing ideas of their own.

As for the restrictions of working in network television, Khan feels it’s a production style that suits her creative goals: the family sitcom is not, after all, intended to project the unfiltered voice of a single creative genius, but to include all the individuals who make up a family unit.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ship-shape ... the cast of Fresh Off the Boat. Photograph: Bob D'Amico/ABC/Getty

Khan’s deliberately diverse writers’ room includes young talent who can connect with the specifics of the Huangs’ story. There’s Sheng Wang, a standup who grew up as part of “the only Taiwanese family in Houston, Texas in the mid-90s” and Sanjay Shah, an Indian-American King of The Hill alumnus whose dad owned a Burger King in Sacramento. Yet, despite Huang’s intimations otherwise, Khan also recognises elements of her own upbringing: “I really related to that experience of being what we call the ‘bridge generation’ and always trying to navigate your more traditional growing-up experiences with wanting the latest Air Jordans or whatever it is. Trying to explain to your parents why and they just, like, don’t get it.”

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In the show, it’s strict mum Jessica, played by Taiwanese-American actor Constance Wu, who mines the most comedy from this parental bafflement. Young Eddie is the heart of the show, but viewers may often find themselves nodding along in sympathy when Jessica questions the appropriateness of her son’s worship of Ol’ Dirty Bastard or fails to grasp the entertainment value in the American sport of Nascar. This kind of Jessica-generated subplot is, says Khan, “a small example of how, when you’re looking at a family sitcom through a different lens it just opens up different ways of storytelling.”

Wu, who in real life speaks with an American accent and says “rad” a lot, has previously expressed frustration with the lack of screen representation of Asian-Americans and the Hollywood practice of casting white actors in non-white roles (in 2016, the actor called on Hollywood to “stop perpetuating the racist myth that [only a] white man can save the world” in response to Matt Damon’s casting in the film The Great Wall). Today, though, she’s in a more forgiving mood: “When people whitewash roles, usually they’re people who have good intentions, but they just don’t know and the only way you make them know is to start a conversation.” She has also been particularly impressed by popular network television’s power to do just that. “I get people coming up to me in tears because they are so moved by the fact that there is a show where Asian-Americans are front and centre. And not only that, their ethnicity is important to character, rather than being incidental.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Breaking stereotypes ... Margaret Cho in All-American Girl. Photograph: ABC/Getty

The danger of playing race relations for laughs, however, is that you end up in offensive stereotype territory. TV comedy is still littered with examples of tech-savvy geeks and shrieking dragon ladies, but Fresh Off the Boat avoids this. “I can understand how if someone just watches a trailer or one episode, they could cringe at the idea that Jessica may fit into a stereotype,” says Wu. “But because she is one of the stars of the show, there’s an opportunity to explore other parts of her that aren’t Tiger Mom-ish and also the feelings and dreams she has that may have shaped her.”

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It’s this kind of in-depth, culturally rooted characterisation, says Wu, that has made Jessica a favourite with the show’s fans: “She’s obviously an immigrant, she didn’t grow up in American culture, she didn’t grow up speaking the language, so she has an accent, yet she still doesn’t think that’s any reason for her not to have a voice. She still has confidence in her point of view, even when exterior forces encourage her not to. She still stays true to herself.”

Through this affectionate exploration of the parents’ perspective as well as the kids’, Fresh Off the Boat has evolved into more than just a popular, funny sitcom. It’s a kind of 70-episode-and-counting thank-you letter, from the bridge generation to their immigrant parents: “Now that we’re grownups, it’s like, you know what? My mum wasn’t that off! I get it, you know?” says Khan.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Man overboard ... Eddie Huang. Photograph: Kris Connor/Getty

Yet still, the show’s most important achievement may be in the less soppy business-acumen category of which Jessica would no doubt approve. For a long time, film and television industries claimed the reason for not telling Asian-American stories was a commercial decision, based on the vague assumption that non-Asian viewers wouldn’t be interested. “Networks love data,” says Khan. “They love to be able to look at numbers and try to predict what they think will work. We showed that there is an audience for this – and now let’s just keep going.”

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Fresh Off the Boat’s success means it’s now possible to look to the future with confidence. “I think the next step is not positive representation but just more representation in general; narrative plenitude, instead of narrative scarcity,” says Wu. “Then you don’t have to cringe or brace yourself every time you see an Asian on screen because you’re scared that they’re going to misrepresent you.”

Once the fear was that the tired conventions of mainstream television would smother the truth of the immigrant story. Instead, it seems, the opposite has happened: the immigrant story has made the family sitcom feel fresh again.

Fresh off the Boat is on Wednesdays at 8pm on 5STAR