NICHOLAS HUNE-BROWN\u00a0\/ The Walrus<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n a film studio<\/span> on a scrubby stretch of Toronto\u2019s Lake Shore Boulevard one Wednesday in July, Ins Choi sits perched in a chair, baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, watching intently as a pair of actors rehearse. Choi is the forty-two-year-old co-creator of Kim\u2019s Convenience<\/em>, a half-hour TV show premiering this fall on cbc<\/span>. As the actors block the scene, he scrolls through the script on his MacBook, following along. \u201cWhat\u2019s that new line, Ins?\u201d one of the actors calls out. Choi reads from the screen: \u201cDon\u2019t worry about me, it\u2019s all good. Family is family.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s the subject at the centre of Choi\u2019s show. Based on his play of the same name, Kim\u2019s Convenience<\/em> is a single-camera comedy about a Korean-Canadian family much like Choi\u2019s own. It follows Mr. and Mrs. Kim (Appa and Umma), who bought a convenience store in Toronto\u2019s Regent Park in the \u201980s and are now watching as the neighbourhood gentrifies and their grown children squirm against their influence. Rooted in Choi\u2019s specific family experience, it\u2019s an immigrant story with familiar themes\u2014parents who sacrificed everything so their kids could have a better life, and are then inevitably appalled and dumbfounded by the lives said kids choose. One of the sets is in a church basement that\u2019s been made to look like Choi\u2019s parents\u2019 church basement. The living room is inspired by his parents\u2019 living room, photos of the cast mixed in with black-and-white pictures of Choi\u2019s Korean ancestors, stiff and upright in their Sunday best. When his parents visited the studio a few weeks earlier, they were mortified by the messiness of the apartment and urged their son to tidy up before shooting.<\/p>\n That Choi has managed to transplant this personal world into a prime time Canadian sitcom feels unprecedented, almost miraculous. In the last four years, the faces on television shows have begun to more closely resemble the faces of their audience. Discussions about onscreen representation have become more intelligent and insistent as viewers have demanded onscreen diversity that goes beyond the one-black-friend model. In Canada, a country that has produced multiple mainstream TV shows starring heroic German Shepherds and zero starring Asian families, the mere existence of Kim\u2019s Convenience<\/em> is a sign of progress. In 2016, Choi and the cbc<\/span> are filling the screen with raucous Koreans, trusting that audiences in rural Saskatchewan are ready for a heartfelt comedy about a belligerent immigrant store owner and his family.<\/p>\n On a lunch break, Choi walks out of the cavernous studio and into the thick summer heat. Despite being the co-executive producer of a TV show, he comes across as guileless, a showbiz na\u00eff accustomed to the nurturing world of the theatre who woke up one day and found himself on a television set.<\/p>\n \u201cHow did this all happen<\/em>?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat, the TV show?\u201d Choi says, deadpan. He picks at his plate from craft services, shifts a few sweet potatoes around. \u201cYeah, it\u2019s a big mystery.\u201d<\/p>\n T<\/span>o flick through<\/span> Canadian television in 2016 is to visit a strange, unfamiliar country\u2014a nation filled with strawberry-blond horse whisperers and turn-of-the-century detectives, a place where every third person you meet is an exhaustingly plucky Newfoundlander with something slightly naughty to tell you.<\/p>\n In reality, one in five Canadians is a visible minority. In Vancouver and Toronto, where many of these shows are shot, nearly half the residents are people of colour. And yet on our televisions, minorities exist at the margins. They\u2019re there for a moment\u2014working the front desk at the gym, mopping up after a group of wacky elementary-school teachers\u2014and then they\u2019re gone, multicultural set dressing against which the paler denizens of TV Canada live their eventful lives.<\/p>\n In a business still dominated by white people\u2014liberal, painfully well-meaning white people\u2014the ethnic characters that do exist can become the victims of a deadening politeness. Little Mosque on the Prairie<\/em> became an object lesson in the virtues and gentle foibles of Canadian multiculturalism instead of an actual comedy. Rather than risk creating an offensive caricature, creators render non-white characters as boring, flawless, and unspecific\u2014less than fully human. The particularities of ethnicity are cast aside in favour of \u201ccolourblind casting,\u201d which too often means taking a character written as white (a \u201cneutral\u201d character) and casting someone black or South Asian\u2014anyone, really, to avoid the mild embarrassment that comes with an all-Caucasian cast.<\/p>\n Working as an actor in this environment can be exhausting. Jean Yoon, who plays Mrs. Kim, has an imdb<\/span> page that stretches from Hollywood movies such as The Time Traveler\u2019s Wife<\/em> to Canadian TV shows such asBeing Erica<\/em>. \u201cI\u2019ve had lots of really exciting opportunities, and I\u2019ve had some great roles,\u201d Yoon says. \u201cBut I can still count on one hand the number of projects I\u2019ve worked on in film or television where I have a private life, where my primary function as a character isn\u2019t just to move the story along.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, the forty-four-year-old Torontonian who plays the irascible Mr. Kim, says that before this show, he had given up on his dream of playing lead roles on TV, and instead concentrated on developing his skills as a character actor. \u201cAs a young actor, you\u2019ll take anything: thug number one, gangster number three, convenience-store clerk or doctor,\u201d says Lee. \u201cAs your career goes on, the parts get a little bigger, but never as a lead. It can be frustrating.\u201d<\/p>\n When Choi approached Lee and Yoon with a play set in a Toronto convenience store and the chance to take on complex, funny, often infuriating characters, the pair eagerly accepted. In 2010, Choi was a theatre actor trying to write something that felt true to his experience of growing up in multicultural Toronto. He spent five years working on drafts of his first play. At one point, low on funds, his Korean church raised $3,000 to help fund a workshop performance of the show, which allowed Choi to see the work-in-progress on its feet.<\/p>\n When it was finished, he sent the play to every major Toronto theatre company and was rejected by all of them. So he applied for the Fringe Festival, funding a bare-bones production just to finally get the show in front of an audience. Choi directed it himself and played the estranged son, Jung (aged down and played by Simu Liu in the cbc<\/span> version). Lee had to go to his agent and sheepishly explain that he wanted to act in adiy<\/span> Fringe show for free. \u201cI know the season is really busy, but in my soul I need to do this play,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The show was an instant hit. As embodied by Lee, Mr. Kim is an irresistible character. With a thick accent and burly physicality, he\u2019s a cantankerous patriarch from the old world, a man stubbornly trying to navigate life with as much dignity as possible. A proud Korean nationalist, he calls the police whenever a Japanese-made vehicle is illegally parked in front of the store. He has a complex system of stereotypes he uses to figure out who will shoplift. \u201cFat black girl is no steal. Fat white guy, that\u2019s steal,\u201d he explains to his horrified daughter.<\/p>\n The character felt at once totally familiar, a recognizable Canadian archetype, and also completely new, someone you hadn\u2019t seen before on stage or in film. Or rather, he felt like someone you\u2019d seen a million times, but always in passing\u2014handing a lead character some change, telling a cop about a suspicious customer in a pre-credit sequence\u2014before the camera pans away to tell someone else\u2019s story.<\/p>\n The show set off a bidding war among Toronto theatre companies. Choi eventually chose Soulpepper, where the remount won the Toronto Theatre Critics\u2019 Award for best play in 2012 before touring the country. The play\u2019s success immediately drew attention from the TV world, and Choi went on what felt like endless lunch dates with producers, directors, and production companies. \u201cMost of them were kind of aggressive, and I was scared,\u201d he says. He didn\u2019t want to make a show he wasn\u2019t proud of, something that wasn\u2019t true to his vision. \u201cIn the end of that, I said, \u2018You know what, I\u2019m not interested in making a TV show or movie. I just like it as a play. I\u2019m not that ambitious.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In 2011, at a Soulpepper rehearsal, Choi met Ivan Fecan, a former television executive. It wasn\u2019t until 2014\u2014when representatives from Fecan\u2019s new production company, Thunderbird, approached him during a Vancouver run\u2014that he decided to move forward with a TV show.<\/p>\n Choi had never written for television. (In the years since premieringKim\u2019s Convenience<\/em>, he had written one other play.) And so producers sent him on a series of blind dates to try to find a partner who could help navigate the specific beats of a half-hour show. Choi remembers meeting with a parade of writers, all of whom seemed to have similar resum\u00e9s and similar backgrounds. \u201cMost of them were white,\u201d says Choi. \u201cEveryone\u2019s white. And that bugged me initially. Until I realized that\u2019s a given right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Choi eventually teamed up with Kevin White, a TV writer and showrunner who has worked on Corner Gas<\/em> and Schitt\u2019s Creek<\/em>. At the time, Choi wasn\u2019t much of a television watcher, but after swallowing entire seasons of various comedies, he found himself drawn to shows such as Louie<\/em> and Master of None<\/em>, spiky comedies that stray from sitcom rhythms and aren\u2019t afraid to mix pathos in with the laughs. \u201cThe whole strategy was, let\u2019s mine what worked in the play and bring that to the screen,\u201d says Choi.<\/p>\n I<\/span>n the five years<\/span> since Kim\u2019s Convenience<\/em> debuted at the Fringe festival, the television world has changed. The success of such shows as The Mindy Project<\/em>, Fresh Off the Boat<\/em>, and Black-ish<\/em> has shown that putting new faces onscreen and behind the camera isn\u2019t some chore that networks must dutifully perform, but an opportunity to find fresh sources of humour and drama. In addition to the endless supply of shows about thirtysomething white people moping through the fashionable neighbourhoods of New York and LA, we get sketch comedians Key and Peele as code-switching biracial nebbishes. We get Aziz Ansari on Master of None<\/em> experiencing a specific kind of second-generation guilt as a New York foodie who is unappreciative of his Indian parents\u2019 sacrifices. We get characters on Fresh Off the Boat<\/em> speaking in Chinese accents without the accent itself being the butt of the joke (an idea so radically counterintuitive it must have felt like introducing a cream pie into a scene at a clown convention and then having everyone just enjoy dessert).<\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019re in a moment,\u201d Choi says. However silly it may seem as a narrative form, the family sitcom feels like the pinnacle of a certain kind of cultural creation. There has always been art about the immigrant experience\u2014intergenerational novels and reverent documentaries. But a sitcom, with its crass populist ambitions, is a true sign of mainstream acceptance.<\/p>\n There is, of course, no guarantee that this moment will last. The current wave of diverse television shows\u2014also slated for the fall is City TV\u2019s Second Jen, a sitcom with two Asian female leads\u2014could be the beginning of a representative future or simply an aberration. The fact that these stories are still so rare puts an unnatural pressure on the ones that actually make it to air. Lee says he always tells young actors of colour that they\u2019ll have fewer chances to fail. \u201cIf you\u2019re a white actor and you\u2019re in a string of bad things, you\u2019re often given other chances,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you\u2019re an actor of colour, an Asian actor, they put you in, and if you don\u2019t do as well, they say, \u2018Well, we tried.\u2019\u201d The same feels true of TV shows. When the latest historical drama or East Coast comedy fails, there will be another to take its place. If a show like Kim\u2019s Convenience<\/em> doesn\u2019t work, it could be a long time before you see another East Asian family on Canadian television.<\/p>\n On set after lunch<\/span>, Choi straps on a pair of headphones and watches as the crew films a scene from the show\u2019s first episode, set during Toronto\u2019s Pride Week. Stung by accusations of homophobia, Mr. Kim has decided to offer a gay discount. \u201cThe crux of the story is, how does Appa know who\u2019s gay and who\u2019s not?\u201d Choi says.<\/p>\n While the cameras roll, a customer in drag, played by Thom Allison, inspects the cat food while wearing an enormous blond wig and towering pink heels. \u201cHow much is it?\u201d she asks, brandishing the can.<\/p>\n \u201cNormally, it would be $4.99, but this week we have discount only for the\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. uh\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u201d Kim fumbles through the question, unsure how to classify a six-foot-tall, dark-skinned, mixed-race man in a pink dress. \u201cYou is what kind, trans\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. gender?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a drag queen,\u201d the customer says cautiously.<\/p>\n Kim takes his glasses off, puts them on his chest, and looks at her intently. \u201cWhy you do like that?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n Thanks to Lee\u2019s delivery, the blunt question, its genuine inquisitiveness, gets a laugh. The customer\u2019s response is straightforward and honest. \u201cIt feels like me,\u201d she says. \u201cFeels like home. Always has.\u201d The explanation makes sense to Appa. If the storekeeper is a sort of Korean Archie Bunker\u2014someone whose prejudices constantly bump up against the complexities of real life\u2014a key part of his appeal is his ability to accept that his stereotypes occasionally need adjusting. He rings up the purchase, gay discount included.<\/p>\n