Disney+’s Coming-of-Age Comic Book Adaptation ‘American Born Chinese’ Is Overcrowded, But Endearing: TV Review
variety.comAlison Herman TV Critic A popular reading of superhero mania holds that it’s our era’s substitute for shared mythology; instead of Zeus shooting lightning bolts from Mount Olympus, we have Cyclops shooting beams from his eyeballs.
So it’s fitting that the coming-of-age tale “American Born Chinese” streams on Disney+, the service that’s a one-stop shop for all things Marvel; Destin Daniel Cretton of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” the first Marvel film to star an Asian American hero, even directs the pilot.
But “American Born Chinese” flips the script: rather than use superheroes for modern-day mythmaking, it infuses centuries-old myths into genres (action, bildungsroman) now dominated by superheroes.
Loosely based on Gene Luen Yang’s 2006 graphic novel and created by Kelvin Yu of “Bob’s Burgers” and “Master of None,” “American Born Chinese” revolves around Jin Wang (Ben Wang), a rising sophomore desperate to fit into his majority-white high school — so much so that he’s ditched his nerdy friends who like comics and cosplay for some soccer jocks, and shoplifts a trendy jacket his mom deems too expensive to buy at full price.
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