Nearly 50 years after David Carradine rose to fame as an enigmatic, half-Chinese Shaolin monk in the Wild West, Kung Fu is returning to network television in a new gender-flipped iteration.
But this time, the reboot, the first network drama to feature a predominantly Asian-American cast, is attempting to right some of the wrongs of the original series.
In 1971, not long before starring in films that made him globally famous, Bruce Lee shopped around a new television show The Warrior, about a Chinese martial artist who journeys across America's Old West.
Warner Bros passed on the pitch, which Lee said was because it thought American audiences would not watch a show with an Asian lead. A year later, Warner Bros debuted a similar show called Kung Fu, with Carradine, a white actor with no prior knowledge of martial arts, in the lead role.
The original show's creator, Ed Spielman, said his idea was based on 10 years of personal research. Lee's widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, has argued that Kung Fu is a retooled version of The Warrior.
Kung Fu ran for three seasons from 1972 to 1975, introducing many Western viewers to the power of martial arts.
When Warner Bros asked Christina M. Kim, a television writer and producer best known for her work on Lost (2004-2010) and Blindspot (2015-2020), to spearhead a reboot, she agreed.
She created a show that is a dramatic departure from the original, starting with the protagonist. "I really wanted a kicka**, strong female Asian lead," she said.
The modern-day adaptation follows Nicky Shen (Olivia Liang), a Chinese-American woman who drops out of college and travels to a monastery in China, where she undergoes intensive martial-arts training. But when she returns to find San Francisco overrun with crime and her parents, Jin (Tzi Ma) and Mei-Li (Tan Kheng Hua), at the mercy of an organised crime group, Nicky uses her fighting skills to protect her home town while searching for the assassin who killed her Shaolin mentor (Vanessa Kai).
In the works since 2019, Kung Fu arrives amid an alarming spike in anti-Asian racism, giving its focus on Asian-American people who are victimised and fight back an additional, if unplanned and unwelcome, weight.
"Certainly, our show is not the solution, but I hope we are a part of the solution," Kim said at a press event, the day after eight people, six of them women of Asian descent, were shot to death in Atlanta. "Having a show like ours on the air makes us part of the narrative."
When Kim began writing the pilot episode in 2019, she wanted to highlight the dynamics that exist within an inter-generational Chinese-American family. She knew she needed two key ingredients: a charming, athletic actress and a revered actor as the patriarch.
She auditioned more than 150 actresses before finding Liang, best known as Alyssa Chang on the Vampire Diaries spin-off, Legacies (2018-present). But for the father, Kim had one name in mind from the beginning: Tzi Ma.
With a career spanning four decades and more than 140 credits across film, theatre and television, Ma, now 58, has developed the reputation of being "Hollywood's go-to Asian dad".
Despite not having any children of his own, he has played the father figure for stars like Awkwafina in The Farewell (2019) and Liu Yifei in Disney's adaptation of Mulan (2020).
The Covid-19 pandemic shut down production on the pilot episode in March last year, but Kim was able to put together a reel compelling enough to convince CW Network to greenlight a 13-episode first season. Since resuming production last October, the cast and crew have been shooting the show in Vancouver.
While Fresh Off The Boat (2015-2020) was the rare sitcom to focus on an Asian family, and Asian-led series like Never Have I Ever (2020-present) are available on streaming platforms, there has never been a broadcast drama with a predominantly Asian-American cast.
Kung Fu will become part of the slight but steady advances that Hollywood has recently seen in Asian representation on-screen, especially after the international success of films like Parasite (2019), Minari (2020) and Raya And The Last Dragon (2021).
The cast members are aware of the significance of this multi-generational show during a time of increasing attacks on people of Asian descent, seemingly spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.
While they are careful not to frame a TV drama as any kind of solution to racist violence, they note that the relative lack of Asian actors in mainstream entertainment has led to a kind of cultural invisibility.
"Representation, as much as it is about us being able to see ourselves on-screen, is more about being seen by other groups of people who are not Asian," Liang said.
Ma said that for all the martial-arts fireworks, the most potent aspect of Kung Fu is that it presents "a realistic portrayal of who we are".
NYTIMES
