Super Sitcoms: Kim's Convenience & New Girl

Over the past few months, I have been engaged in a steady binge of two sitcoms I never watched when they originally aired on TV. But now, here I am to tell you that if you need something to cheer you up at 22-minute intervals over the course of multiple seasons, you should be adding these shows to your streaming queues immediately.

Kim's Convenience: What an absolute revelation. Set in Toronto, this show follows the Kim family, led by Sang-Il "Appa" and Yong-mi "Umma" Kim (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Jean Yoon), Korean immigrants who run a neighborhood convenience store. At the start of the series, their daughter, Janet (Andrea Bang), is still living with them and helps out in the store when she isn't in college studying photography (an area of study that is naturally not beloved by her immigrant parents). They also have a son, Jung (Simu Liu, before he became an Avenger and a Ken doll), who is somewhat estranged from the family - while he still speaks to his sister and mother, he hasn't spoken to his father in a long while, because of a troubled childhood that led to him ultimately getting kicked out of the house and left to fend for himself. 

Developed by Ins Choi and Kevin White (from Choi's play of the same name), this show lasted for five seasons and is a sheer joy. I first started watching it with my mother when I was visiting her over a long weekend, and we found ourselves bingeing through the first season in glee, occasionally pausing to remark "wow, Koreans are just like South Indians!" Apparently Asian immigrants have much in common and it was astonishingly funny to watch this show and identify parts of my own life in this family that seemed like they should be so different from my own. (Also, it's wild that Koreans call their parents Appa and Umma, as I thought that was exclusive to South Indians.) Over the course of the five seasons, it's also wonderful to see how these characters grow and evolve, and the changing family dynamics as Janet strives to become more independent, Jung tries to reconcile with his father, and Appa and Umma strive to become less rigid. And of course, there's an insane number of supporting characters who are so fun and engaging in their own right.

The final season of this show is definitely rocky and I wouldn't say the show ended in the best way possible. But it doesn't matter - you will be plenty invested in these characters at that point and be devastated that there aren't ten more seasons for you to watch. The Kim family is the kind of sitcom family we need to see more of on TV, and if you haven't seen them already, drop everything you're doing and turn Netflix on right now.

New Girl: I watched about three episodes of this show when it first aired, decided I didn't care for it, wrote this scathing review, and then promptly forgot all about it. But my fiance is a big fan, and with his insistence that the show eventually evolved to be more about the supporting cast than the main character I found so annoying, I decided to give it another go. We subsequently spent some delightful months making our way through seven seasons, consisting of a total of 146 half-hour episodes. Phew. 

The show tells the story of Jess (Zooey Deschanel), an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles who finds her boyfriend cheating on her with another woman and has to quickly move out of their house. So she moves into a loft apartment with three other men: Nick (Jake Johnson), a surly law school dropout who is now an unambitious bartender and isn't convinced that this emotional woman should be moving in; Schmidt (Max Greenfield, an actor I have loved forever, and who is insanely wonderful on this show), a Jewish, corporate, commitment-phobic bro, who seems like he should be every woman's worst nightmare, but is actually just a fat kid who suddenly became hot and doesn't know how to handle it; and...Coach, but really Winston, because the actor playing Coach (Damon Wayans Jr.) left the show after the pilot, so they hired Lamorne Morris, aka another Black guy, to replace him. Yeah, the optics aren't great, but Winston ends up being the least chaotic member of this little gang of weirdos, even if he does have a penchant for pranks. Rounding out the cast, we have Hannah Simone as Cece, Jess's best friend, who also happens to be a model, so of course, the boys are intrigued by her. But while Cece has her fair share of romantic drama, she and Jess have a great, albeit unlikely friendship, that keeps everything grounded.

This show is very zany, and these characters get up to all manner of shenanigans over the course of seven seasons. I can't really say they evolve too much - these people are all ridiculous and chaotic, and oftentimes I would just be shaking my head at how hapless everyone was being. But the writing and joke density was what carried me through. I may not have cared much for certain characters, but boy did they deliver some great dialogue that made me chuckle. In particular, I could never get over Max Greenfield's line readings or facial expressions - the man has an ability to turn even the most innocuous sentence into an absolute meal. It was also exciting to see Hannah Simone, a half-Indian woman, as a main character on a sitcom, as there is ordinarily a dearth of South Asian representation on American TV. Was it annoying to see her culture and heritage continually stereotyped and no one ever making any effort to pronounce Indian names correctly? For sure. But it's an American network sitcom, and this aired well before the pandemic when folks got much more woke about cultural representation, so I guess we'll give it a pass. If you want jokes, this is the show for you. If you want culturally sensitive commentary, might I refer you back up to Kim's Convenience.