TCA: ABC’s ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ panel gets tense

Wednesday’s Television Critics Association ABC day started off with a very confident Paul Lee, president of ABC. And why shouldn’t he be confident? The network has some of the most popular shows on television. “We’re number one Wednesday, Thursday and Friday,” Lee pointed out.

Lee was asked about the fates of loved but underwatched shows like “Revenge” and “Nashville,” but wouldn’t confirm a fate for either. He sounded a bit more confident about “Nashville,” saying “We’re loving ‘Nashville.’ We’re going to have some great announcements about people who are going to be on ‘Nashville,’ but was a bit less firm on “Revenge,” saying, eventually, “There are ways to reinvent it.”

One thing you won’t see from the network? New singing reality competitions. Lee announced that the new season of “Dancing with the Stars” would return March 16, but when pressed about singing shows, said it wasn’t a focus for ABC right now.

The first show panel for the day was “American Crime,” which we can safely say does not resemble any other show on ABC. This is not “Scandal” — tt comes from “Twelve Years a Slave” screenwriter John Ridley, and explores the effects of a single crime on a diverse array of people all touched by it. Ridley talked about “providing a canvas fro the central characters, their emotions and how what they want may not be commensurate with the officials they’re dealing with.”

Timothy Hutton and Felicity Huffman star, but the cast is large and necessarily diverse, and all the cast members talked about the uniqueness of the experience, with newcomer Richard Cabral getting choked up as he discussed what it was like for him to finally get to play a three dimensional character. Hutton and Huffman are the parents of the murder victim, but that doesn’t mean viewers are always going to sympathize with them, with Hutton saying “The layers and layers of a person’s past are going to be pushed forward. To be able to play those two dynamics is a pretty rare experience for an actor.”

The final panel of the morning was “Fresh Off the Boat,” which had a few tense moments. The questions got off to a rough start when someone asked if there were going to be “chopsticks, and stuff like that,” on the show, and then a great deal of questions about an article Eddie Huang wrote about his sometimes negative feelings about the show, which is based on his memoir, “Fresh Off the Boat.”

Huang got in a tense back and forth with one reporter about it, and defended the article, saying he’d come around on his feelings about the show by the end of it. The panel also had a jolt of controversy from another source: Randall Park, who plays Huang’s father on the show, most recently appeared in “The Interview” as Kim Jong Un. He answered questions about it gracefully, saying “I still haven’t fully kind of pieced together what that whole experience meant to me. I was just glad the movie came out and people go the chance to see the movie.”

The questions also turned to diversity in general, with panel members addressing why there seems to be more of an interest in diverse shows these days. “Asians have money. You want their money, make things for them,” said Huang. “People are really sick of watching things that are for the middle….They want specificity.”

Nanatchka Khan, the showrunner (previously of “Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23”), also addressed Huang’s article, which went into detail about Huang’s concerns about having a Persian showrunner instead of a Chinese or Taiwanese one. “The specifics were different to my experience,” Khan said. “What I related to was the immigrant experience on this show. …That to me was my access point.”