The problem isn’t Cho, it’s the show. In her HBO special she jokes that ABC wanted to call her series “East Meets West” or “Wok on the Wild Side.” She may not have been kidding. Much of the show’s material is, she says, taken “straight from my act” – a hip all-Korean-American 25-year-old with rigidly traditional immigrant parents. But although Korean-Americans may be highly visible in New York and Los Angeles (where programming decisions like this one get made), there aren’t a lot of Korean delis in Peoria. That means going for a broad “ABC family audience,” says the network’s entertainment president, Ted Harbert. It also means introducing a foreign culture to Middle America without resorting to stereotypes. When Cho’s on-screen mom (Jodi Long) dons a pair of extra-big shades, Margaret asks, “What’s with the sunglasses? You look like Yoko Ono” – a cheap ethnic shot. “I don’t want to see what happened with a lot of African-American shows, where the audience was laughing at them and not with them,” says Sumi Haru, an Asian-American official of the Screen Actors Guild. Cho’s brother on the show (B. D. Wong) has already been rewritten to make him less “inscrutable,” says Elizabeth Wong, one of two Asian-American writers (out of 11). Cho is also the only cast member who’s actually Korean. B. D. Wong is Chinese. Amy Hill, the grandmother, is Japanese-Finnish. Test audiences were confused by the Korean references, so a cute neighbor girl has been added whose role is to ask questions like, “In the old country, were girls allowed to date?” Well, at least there aren’t any characters named Kim Chee.
