I'm on vacation! This week, I'm taking a much-needed break to recharge the batteries and get a change of scenery. To keep things going around here, I've enlisted the help of several friends of the blog to submit guest posts on various topics of their choosing. Here's Gil Asakawa (who watches a lot of television).
My wife Erin and I love junk-food TV. From The Blacklist and Blindspot to Grimm and Castle, we turn into small-screen zombies at night, depending on our DVR to serve up our shows. But there's one junk-food TV brand that we've decided to strike from out diet, and delete from our DVR.
After years of devouring the medical soap series Grey's Anatomy, a couple of seasons of the media-political soap Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, the most recent ABC hit series written and produced by Shonda Rhimes, we've gone cold turkey on her shows.
Here's why: Rhimes is a terrific storyteller, and pioneering producer who casts African Americans in prominent or starring roles in her series. But except for Sandra Oh's keystone character, the irascible but brilliant surgeon Cristina Yang, Asians are either non-existent or generally fringe-ified. It's almost as if with Oh's departure from Shondaland (Rhimes' production company and the realm where all these shows dwell), the box for Asian stars was checked off: "Done."
