- Network: ABC
- Series Premiere Date: Feb 4, 2015
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Critic Reviews
- Critic score
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Along with FOX's "Last Man On Earth," Fresh Off The Boat is one of the best new network comedies of the spring and both are probably better than any network half-hour--allowing for "Jane the Virgin" genre wiggle-room here--that debuted last fall.
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Fresh Off the Boat is damn funny--–but not only funny and not cheaply funny. Three episodes in, it’s the best broadcast comedy of the new season, a daring but good-hearted sitcom about the complexities of identity–-about not only being different but being different from the different.
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Fresh Off the Boat is good--at times, very good. Without question, it's one of the best new shows of the broadcast network season: funny, well-acted and promising on a number of levels.
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It’s a relief to find that Fresh Off the Boat is not only genuinely funny and surprisingly broad but also a little bit subversive.
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Fresh Off The Boat may not be the take-no-prisoners depiction of Asian-American life that Huang originally envisioned, but it still provides a perspective long overdue on television in a way that’s at once smart, sweet, and funny--a far cry from “Panda Express.”
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Fresh Off the Boat is the funniest, most charming show of the season.
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Fresh off the Boat has soul, flavor and an incredible cast. Time will tell if the comedy finds the audience it richly deserves.
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The show is perfectly cast, and it certainly seems like there's plenty of story to be had.
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The show--especially by the third episode, “The Shunning”--manages to take a single story and turn it into something uniquely transformative for numerous characters; this is especially true for Eddie and Jessica, who as stay-at-home mom and eldest-immigrant son are, despite their fighting, very close to each other.
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Fresh Off the Boat may not be exactly the series of Huang's dreams, or completely true to the life he has sold to show business, but it's a consistently funny and even important one, with some lovely, nuanced performances.
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While much of the show is driven by the Huangs adapting to a new culture, Fresh Off the Boat finds the amusing parts of that experience without falling back on easy stereotypical jokes.
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The cast of unknowns is terrific and the writing, overseen by executive producer Nahnatchka Khan (“Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23”), is fresh, funny and mostly clean.
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ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat [is] yet another damn good, diverse network sitcom that premieres this Wednesday night and remains funny, charming, sweet, and subtly provocative despite--according to no less an expert than the subject of the show itself--having had some of its edge sanded off.
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In an ABC lineup eager to replicate that rarest of commodities--a good, and modern, family comedy--the show appears to have accomplished what Eddie yearns to do: Fit right in.
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Fresh Off the Boat finds jokes in plenty of other, non-racial issues, and that’s often the bonus that gives you confidence this is a show with legs.
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Watered-down or not, the immigrant/culture clash storylines are the freshest things about Fresh Off the Boat, which is a pastiche of other ABC sitcoms (thankfully, the good ones).
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There's a lot of setup, and we don't know these people well enough yet to laugh with them instead of at them. That begins to change quickly, though, as Fresh Off the Boat gets into its groove, humanizing its characters and upping its humor quotient.
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Fresh Off the Boat is charming, convivial, even--gasp--at times cute.
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Somehow it still manages to find strangeness within its sentimentality. Fresh Off the Boat is unlikely to dismantle the master’s house. But it opens a door.
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The show is sweet enough and features a likable cast. The assimilation material is a bit obvious in the two episodes provided for review, but that’s typical in new comedies trying to establish their stomping grounds.
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It won’t be the hit of the year, but Fresh Off the Boat is worth a look.
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Fresh Off the Boat wants to be both “Black-ish” and “The Goldbergs”--and it works fairly okay as a companion piece to either--but it’s a lot better show when it occasionally stops going for just the easy jokes and aims for a subtler, sharper line of comment.
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There are some very funny moments in the first of tonight's two episodes, most of them provided by Wu and Park, and fleeting indications that Fresh could be a better, deeper show than the one we're seeing.
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Having established the exaggerated and predictable weirdness of all white people, Fresh Off the Boat seems to have run through its one topic--and one joke.
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It’s disappointing that two of the first three episodes are little more than familiar reworkings of overused formulas and plots. But Episode 2 indicates the concept’s promise; the show stops trying to be too many things and, for a half-hour at least, finds a groove.
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Fresh Off The Boat, when it has flashes of energy and well-written jokes, easily transcends ethnic stereotypes, but it’s these sitcom stereotypes that are the ones the show needs to defeat if it wants to be both long-running and distinctive.
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Fresh Off the Boat paddles hard in its efforts to be an amusing comedy with heart. So far, the parents--not the featured kid--are the primary reasons to watch.
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The first episode focuses far too much on these stereotypes. On top of that, it’s not even funny. But what a difference a second episode makes.... The real difference between the first and second episodes, though, is not just that the stereotypes are eventually turned upside down but that the characters are no longer just those stereotypes.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 76 out of 102
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Mixed: 13 out of 102
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Negative: 13 out of 102
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Feb 6, 2015
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Feb 5, 2015
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Feb 9, 2015