Asian art is having a moment in Aotearoa. By Nathan Joe Read Time: 13 mins. Naming the intersections of something helps us better understand how it fits into the landscape and, ideally, embrace its multiplicity. The sitcom has historically been a haven for the average citizen to retreat into, a relatively apolitical and unchallenging space to indulge in the lives and setups of others.
For a millennial like myself, Friends is probably the apotheosis of the form. Sitcom as nostalgia. Sitcom as comfort food. Sitcom as relief. Sitcom as family. An inherently artificial genre, the very antithesis of authenticity, with its mugging to camera, laugh tracks and punchlines. After all, the sitcom provides a safe way to present Asianness as not too radical. Like the Showrunner in Prime-Time , playwright Nahyeon Lee has chosen the sitcom as a vehicle to Trojan horse her audience with big ideas and debates.
And like any good Trojan horse, Prime-Time does a convincing job of replicating its vessel. The sitcom within the play is something of an uncanny valley, in that it has all the markers of the real thing yet feels off.
Rather than go for crude parody, there is something eerily on point about its construction. After all, can satire even pack a punch in a post-Trump world? The play works best when we can feel the form of the sitcom struggle against the politics of the Showrunner, and the politics of the playwright by proxy.
How political can the sitcom be? How political should art be, should Asian art be? If art tends towards either painting a picture of how the world is, or how the world could be, Prime-Time throws us into the world of the former. A world where authenticity is just another form of commodification, something we brand ourselves by. But, to be honest, the world is uglier and scarier than my play. Asian New Zealanders writing for our mainstages are still a relatively recent phenomenon.
