ABC developing 'Ohana;' telling Hawaii's story from a non-white perspective

WITH A REBOOT of Magnum P.I., set to debut later this year joining the ongoing series Hawaii Five-O, there comes a new project telling stories from the Hawaiian perspective.
Credit the critical and box office success of Crazy Rich Asians, the Warner Bros. movie featuring an all-Asian cast for encouraging ABC to give the go-ahead for

“The landscape has shifted dramatically in the last 12 months, and maybe in the last week,” writer/journalist Lisa Takeuchi Cullen told The Hollywood Reporter, referencing the renewed interest and demand for Asian and Asian-American stories “Crazy Rich Asians’s” box office and critical success has inspired.

LISA TAKEUCHI CULLEN

Titled Ohana, Cullen’s show is based on Kiana Davenport’s 1994 novel Shark Dialogues that highlights the ways diverse  cultures, United States colonialism and other historical forces have influenced contemporary Hawaii.The word "ohana" is Hawaiian for family.

The proposed series is about four hapa women who inherit the family plantation when their grandmother, a kahuna (e.g. a Hawaiian mystic), dies under mysterious circumstances. “Each of the four protagonists is of a different mixed ethnicity — half-white, half-Japanese, half-Filipino, and half-black — and their unexpected shared inheritance will force them to overcome years of jealousies, misunderstandings, resentments, and secrets,” the source details.

If that's not enough to get the AAPI audience's attention, I don't know what will.

“So many Hawaii-set stories have been told from the white point of view,” Cullen told THR. “This is a story we’re passionate about telling from the point of view of native Hawaiians — Pacific Islanders, people of Asian descent, and people of hapa heritage.”

Cullen is writing the project and the JuVee Productions' husband-and-wife team of Viola Davis and Julius Tennon is producing the project.

Ohana is a project that fits JuVee's goal: "embracing cultures and points of view from all over the world and showing that we all can relate and connect to each other,” Davis and Tennon said in a statement.

Cullen worked as a staff writer and foreign correspondent at Time, and has written two books: memoir Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death and novel Pastors’ Wives. She wrote and produced the 2013 CBS pilot The Ordained, which centered on a priest-turned-lawyer from a Kennedy-esque family.

Cullen told THR that ABC approved the project on Aug. 17, the same day that Crazy Rich Asians premiered.
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