Sunny & Glenn: Asian/American heroic characters dominate Sunday TV,

TONIGHT (Nov. 22) will be the second episode of Into the Badlands, a tale in a dystopian America where the country is divided into 7 fiefdoms ruled by powerful barons.

The opening fight sequence starring Asian/American Daniel Wu is one of the best I've seen as a fan of martial arts films and a follower of the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. It is just so cool.

If that doesn't make you want to watch AMC's 6-episode series first season, I don't know what will.

Wu 's character, Sunny, may have started out as the stereotypical strong, silent type, a staple of these types of stories, but as the first episode demonstrates, the writers are making an attempt to tell his back-story to explain why he is the way he is.

I realize that this type of show is not for everyone. It's just for fun and we need a little bit of escape from the real world, full of violence, wars, ignorance and terrorism.

Meanwhile, back to the Walking Dead ...

WARNING: Spoilers ahead ...

WHAT THE HECK? The producers of the Walking Dead continue to tease us about fan favorite Glenn Rhee, played by Stephen Yeun.

The last time we see Glenn, we see him trying to avoid being lunch for a herd of zombies. Since that time, fans have been going crazy speculating about his fate. This is another strong prediction.

The general consensus from a variety of sources seems to indicate that he somehow survives (don't ask me how!), 

The question becomes, when will the producers reveal that he's still alive? And if he's alive, is it only a brief respite before his life is in danger again. That depends on whether or not the producers deviate from the comic book storyline, which they have done several times. #SaveGlenn, #KeepGlennAlive

Stephen Yeun plays fan favorite Glenn Rhee.

Most likely, we won't know the answer tonight. The producers need something to draw in fans for the mid-season finale next week. Or, the sneaky creators may decide to withhold the answer until the next February when the series returns.(Curses, on them!)

As the lone Asian survivor of the zombie apocalypse,  we have more than a passing interest in Glenn's story. Not only has he evolved from a pizza delivery guy to a out-and-out badass, his character is one of the very few who has not killed a human being maintaining his own humanity in the show's bleak environment, he is one of the few Asian male to actually get the girl. 

Will the producers throw all that away simply to make a dramatic point? Or, will another one of the characters take Glenn's place when the show introduces villain Negan, the leader of the Wolves, who disposes of Glenn in the comics in a most horrific way? 

Like zombies, fans will continue to tune in to follow the survivors and suffer the highs-and-lows with their favorite characters.

###

TGIF FEATURE: Premiering Sunday, 'Into The Badlands' starring an Asian/American badass

Stephen Fung and Daniel Wu provides insight into their action-packed show' Into the Badlands.'

FINALLY, Into The Badlands, is here, premiering Sunday (Nov. 15) starring California-raised Daniel Wu, who may become the next big Asian/American action hero.

No yellow-face here. No eyes taped into a squint. No accents or speaking broken English. No mysterious sayings open to all kinds of misinterpretation. 

Anticipation for this AMC production has been building for a year and reached a crescendo with the previews at ComicCon in San Diego. Wu, who after years of starring in over 60 movies in Hong Kong, has come back home to see if a the tastes of the American television audience is ready for a heroic Asian badass.

Well ... OK, he's skilled in the martial arts. Some stereotypes are tough to kill. But he's a good guy. Or, at least he wants to be a good guy. A bad guy wanting to be a good guy. Something like that.

Be thankful for what he's not. Wu's Sunny is not: a sex-starved buffoon, a second banana (no pun intended), a nerd, a white guy's best friend or the anonymous Asian guy lurking in the background.

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wu looked up to some of martial arts’ biggest stars. “As a Chinese-American kid growing up here, there was not many role models I could look up to on the big screen,” he said. “The ones that appeared were Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Those were the guys that inspired me to want to learn martial arts.”

Wu, along with fellow executive producer Stephen Fung, serves as fight director for the series.

Although best known for his action films - and Badlands does nothing to dispel that - it may be a recently released romantic comedy that will bring him the to the attention of Hollywood producers and writers. Go Away Mr. Tumour, is a gigantic box-office hit in China, and it is also China's entry in the foreign-language Oscar category.

"It's not at all my objective to become an Asian-American star," says Wu. He says it only occurred to him recently that he's now become that rare animal on American television: an Asian lead. "This will only be significant in proving that American tastes are evolving if (Into the Badlands) succeeds," he says.

The six-episode martial-arts series is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the last traces of civilization reside in territories controlled by power-mad feudal barons. Working for one of these is cold-blooded assassin Sunny (Wu), who embarks on a spiritual journey with a teenager, M.K. (Aramis Knight), in tow. (Although the role of M.K. was not intentionally written for an Asian actor, it turns out that Aramis is half-Pakistani.)

We will have to wait and see if Sunny gets the girl. Any white hero eventually ends up with the girl, right? Asian characters don't follow that path in U.S. productions. The danger of martial arts-based characters - especially those played by Asian actors - is that they are one-dimensional fighters and nothing else; essentially emotionally and physically neutered.

Let's hope that Wu, who is the show's executive producer, has enough moxie and pull with the AMC to allow Sunny evolve into a more complex, multifaceted character. That would help the push the show beyond the kung fu genre.

“It can’t be just a martial arts show,” says Wu. “That’s a very narrow niche. 

"Just like what ‘The Walking Dead’ did for the zombie genre, you have to elevate it to another level so an audience can get into it. It’s not zombies chomping on people. We’ve seen that since the ‘60s. It’s the same thing with us. We’re trying to create a really compelling story, around the martial arts.”

###

We're cheering for the new Asian/American hero in 'Into the Badlands'

Daniel Wu's character will present a new image of Asian American males to America's TV viewers. 

I'M KIND of excited to see the upcoming television series Into The Badlands starring Asian/American Daniel Wu. 

Wu was born in Berkeley, California. His acting career took off in Hong Kong where he found plenty of work as an actor, director, producer and scholar in the Chinese martial arts discipline of wushu. 

In the bustling Hong Kong movie industry, he has been featured in more than 60 films and won the Hong Kong prize as Best Director for his 2006 feature, The Heavenly Kings, his directorial debut.

Into The Badlands is loosely based on the Chinese tale Journey to the West: a warrior travels through a land ruled by feudal warlords except the story has been transferred to a dystopian landscape of a post-apocalypse America.  The environment is similar to that period in feudal Japan when there were a host of masterless samurai, or ronin, selling their swords to local warlords or shoguns. 

The trailer below generated a lot of buzz at the recent ComicCon held in San Diego earlier this summer.

Like many new action-oriented shows, Badlands' trademark will be the fight scenes using the martial arts skills Wu developed in his Hong Kong career. Martial arts works because in the world of Badlands, guns are banned, hence swords, kicks and punches become the weapons of choice.

Because there is an emphasis on fight scenes, the producers have brought over Master Dee Dee as the show's martial arts coordinator. He is well known in the Hong Kong movie industry for his choreographed fights. Actors in Badlands must undergo rigorous training to survive the fight scenes and to make them look realistic. See the video above.

Wu was able to convince his friend, Vietnamese American Cung Le, into joining the cast of  Badlands. Le, out of San Jose gained fame in the fighting circles using his martial arts skills. I'm not sure if Le will be a good guy or a bad guy.

Wu's debut on American television makes him the first Asian/American male to be the main lead in a TV action series since ... well ... Dean Cain as Superman in Lois and Clark. which had a five-season run, 1993-1997, on ABC. However, in that case, Cain, who was born Dean George Tanaka, wasn't portraying an Asian. He was playing an undocumented alien from the planet Krypton.

Apologies to all the other Asian/American actors who are currently on TV in comedic or secondary roles, your "representation" is much appreciated; but its been a long time since an Asian/American played a genuinely heroic lead character. 

Into the Badlands was picked up by AMC but that network must be hedging its bets since they only contracted for six episodes. So, be sure to tell your friends to watch it when it debuts in November.  

Based on the behind-the-scenes clip of the actors training for their fight scenes, the action is going to be spectacular - on par with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

I only hope that as much attention was spent on the writing as was given to the fight scenes. The question in my mind: will the hero get the girl; or will he be one of those one-dimensional fighting dudes that (mostly) white writers like to create for non-threatening  Asian men?

On this front there is some hope. Wu said no matter how good the martial arts are, the key is to have a good, compelling story: “We wanted the storyline to be as good, if not better, than the action scenes.”

###