摘要
Television has remained the dominant platform for media consumption for more than ninety years. On average, Americans watch television for more than five hours per day (Nielsen Media, 2016). Moreover, television series are actually easier to access worldwide than ever before, using new media platforms such as Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and TV.com (Koblin, 2016). Characters now represent a wider range of ethnic backgrounds, which can provide audiences with more opportunities to gain insight into a variety of lifestyles and cultures. However, if those programs include characters or situations based on ethnic stereotypes, they paradoxically corroborate those overgeneralizations, unwittingly providing evidence for the audience to identify them as facts. American television media's narrow vision of Asian culture has generally included all of the traditional stock characters: ＂model minorities,＂ ＂dragon ladies,＂ ＂lotus blossoms,＂ and ＂tiger moms,＂ as well as displays of extreme conservatism and superstition, male emasculation, and the threat of ＂yellow peril.＂ In contrast, Fresh Off the Boat (2015), based on a memoir written by American-born Taiwanese Eddie Huang, has been highly praised as a more realistic representation of the Asian-American family. However, little research has analyzed how much this television series actually departs from Asian stereotypes and to what extent it helps to perpetuate them. Moreover, there has not been a comprehensive approach to identifying specific examples of both the supported ones and the dispellers. This study analyzed the plot lines and characters in Season 1 of Fresh Off the Boat to investigate both its successes and shortcomings with respect to dispelling Asian stereotypes in American media.