The "Bland Asian" pt. 2 - Elementary
One of the most egregiously fanboy examples is the crying and gnashing of teeth when a show is remade and one of the characters is recast as a woman. Battlestar Galactica had to fight for viewers after the mass calling of OMG you made Starbuck a woman! And "BOOMER too?" And "Cylons are NOT hot blondes!" from the promos alone. And this was ignoring the fact that the original BSG was one of the saddest attempts to cash in on the Star Wars craze that television produced in the 70s.
So in that context, I love the idea of Lucy Liu getting cast as Watson in the show Elementary. The actual attempt at making Sherlock Holmes into a modern detective is weird even though it was done more or less successfully in Sherlock (and House) because most of the "amazing" deductive skills on display in those original stories are the kind of things that homicide detectives are trained for already and he's just getting in the way. And there's the whole trope of the Victorian drug addict that is weird.
But I think I liked the idea of Lucy Liu playing Watson as soon as I heard it, but when I resaw the episode of Sherlock with the Magical Asian slowly demonstrating a tea ceremony before getting killed in some Triad related mystery (but NEVER speaking in anything but that irritating slow and "exotic" voice) I loved it. At very least, it will keep the Orientalism out of the show.
Also, Watson can be a great character or a narrator depending on the actor and writer and Lucy Liu is great enough to make that character great even with terrible writing.
This is partially in response to being criticized for calling Tosh from Torchwood the Bland Asian but also part of a long-standing annoyance with the way that Western media tends to portray minorities. I heard Michael Boatman (Spin City, Anger Management) at a convention panel on Race in Horror talking about how the fact that Hollywood is actively trying not to offend people means that they now write Token characters for minorities. While that might be a step up from the massive racial stereotyping (Mickey Rooney playing a "whacky" Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany's) it doesn't bode well when they relegate the Asian and black actors to playing "judge who has three lines" or "cop who eats a sandwich".
It's changed slightly but characters like Tosh just scream "We cast an Asian woman in this part and we don't want to offend ANYONE so let's just have her hanging around on the periphery until we give her the most boring story possible."
So in that context, I love the idea of Lucy Liu getting cast as Watson in the show Elementary. The actual attempt at making Sherlock Holmes into a modern detective is weird even though it was done more or less successfully in Sherlock (and House) because most of the "amazing" deductive skills on display in those original stories are the kind of things that homicide detectives are trained for already and he's just getting in the way. And there's the whole trope of the Victorian drug addict that is weird.
But I think I liked the idea of Lucy Liu playing Watson as soon as I heard it, but when I resaw the episode of Sherlock with the Magical Asian slowly demonstrating a tea ceremony before getting killed in some Triad related mystery (but NEVER speaking in anything but that irritating slow and "exotic" voice) I loved it. At very least, it will keep the Orientalism out of the show.
Also, Watson can be a great character or a narrator depending on the actor and writer and Lucy Liu is great enough to make that character great even with terrible writing.
This is partially in response to being criticized for calling Tosh from Torchwood the Bland Asian but also part of a long-standing annoyance with the way that Western media tends to portray minorities. I heard Michael Boatman (Spin City, Anger Management) at a convention panel on Race in Horror talking about how the fact that Hollywood is actively trying not to offend people means that they now write Token characters for minorities. While that might be a step up from the massive racial stereotyping (Mickey Rooney playing a "whacky" Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany's) it doesn't bode well when they relegate the Asian and black actors to playing "judge who has three lines" or "cop who eats a sandwich".
It's changed slightly but characters like Tosh just scream "We cast an Asian woman in this part and we don't want to offend ANYONE so let's just have her hanging around on the periphery until we give her the most boring story possible."