Cinemax's Warrior feels more relevent amid a wave of anti-Asian violence

Los Angeles Review of Books

The period action drama based on an original concept and treatment from Bruce Lee "understands a lot about popular storytelling, which makes me genuinely sorry that it may now be over," says Min Hyoung Song. "Cinemax has recently announced it will no longer be financing new content, and the only chance the show has of continuing is if HBO Max, where it is currently streaming, decides to pick it up. It’s handling of racial stereotypes in particular is savvy. It doesn’t simply reject them, allowing them in this way to dictate what is presented on the screen in a futile attempt to deny their existence, but steers directly into their direction. Its depiction of Chinatown draws from the most obvious ways of depicting the Chinese in the late 19th century: Chinese women are mostly sex workers in need of saving (as I’ve already pointed out), the Chinese live in a maze of often subterranean dwellings, they are prone to violence and vice, and their opium a source of abandonment and lethargy. The Irish also follow a familiar script: they have large families, drink nonstop, fight and lounge around but don’t work very hard. But then the show adds on layers of complexity to what is already familiar: the Chinese characters have a lot of feelings and resent the racism they keep encountering, they have ambitions and dreams of their own they are actively pursuing, the stories the show tells are told explicitly from their perspective (even giving them the camera’s first-person perspective), and the Irish are shown not to be poor because of their aversion to work but because of the collusion of factory owners and politicians. While this strategy might backfire, as in its treatment of sex work and race, it also makes some fresh representation possible."