On March 8, the producers of Kim’s Convenience announced that the sitcom’s fifth season—which was then airing in Canada—would be its last. Their announcement apparently blindsided everyone else: The show had already been picked up for a sixth season. The cocreators, though, said that they wanted to move on to “other projects”—so their seemingly surprised cast began issuing off-the-cuff goodbyes to their viewers on social media. Like fellow Canadian show Schitt’s Creek, Kim’s Convenience had gained a global fan base after being picked up for redistribution by Netflix. That final fifth season begins airing on the platform today, positioning the show to win over even more viewers—even though a last-minute renewal is highly unlikely.
The show started as a play written by cocreator Ins Choi when he wasn’t finding the acting roles he wanted for himself—the classic minority playwright-screenwriter story. He based it on his own experience working at convenience stores when his family first immigrated to Canada from South Korea. Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Jean Yoon play Appa and Umma, the Kim family’s respective father and mother figures (these being their Korean titles). Though they speak English with Korean accents, this is never approached as a punch line. Instead, their Koreanness is treated more as setting: They go to Korean church, eat Korean food, and exclaim “aicham!” in frustration.
The show’s first season was largely focused on the Korean immigrant experience, from Umma looking for a “cool Christian Korean boyfriend” for daughter Janet—played by Andrea Bang—to Appa’s antipathy for Japanese people, and his explaining to a white customer that ginseng is called insam in Korean. It delved into the second-generation immigrant experience too: In one episode, Janet tries to speak to a waiter in Korean when out to lunch with her visiting cousin, but can only stammer a broken sentence. In another, Janet’s art professor says she was looking for more “struggle” in a photography assignment, hinting that she thought Janet’s parents were refugees because she’s Asian. After Appa disciplines the professor’s son for misbehaving in his store, the professor gives Janet a better grade for the “abuse” she’s endured; Janet takes it.
Over time, though, Kim’s Convenience shifted from these sorts of stories to a more general buffoonery—in its final season, Appa and Umma pretend to live in a posh suburb so they can use its nice tennis courts—and universal generational differences, as when Appa reads Janet’s diary. Viewers didn’t mind. Kim’s Convenience was never a “struggle” show: The Kim family does not find it hard to maintain social relationships with various kinds of Canadians, and their business appears to be doing well. Appa and Umma are also always shown giving their love freely and often to their offspring and are never painted as being stereotypical “tiger parents.” The characters’ difficulties, such as Umma’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis, come not from their being Korean, but from the unrelenting course of life.
But while the show is mainly lighthearted, with deeper issues generally getting resolved in a neat and optimistic manner, there’s also a darker strand running through it: Appa’s estrangement with son Jung, played by Simu Liu. Jung’s past is drip-fed through the seasons, with more details of situations that eventually landed him in juvenile detention being revealed in the last season. Liu, in his Twitter statement about the show’s abrupt ending, said he was disappointed Jung would not be able to fully realize his growth, nor have a satisfying reconciliation with his father. We find out about another dimension of Janet’s character as well, but this reveal is only touched upon—it seems the writers were waiting for the next season to fully flesh it out.
Kim’s Convenience has succeeded because it didn’t do what was obvious, or more specifically, what would have seemed obvious to a white audience; rarely has a show centered an Asian family cast without centering its story lines on being Asian. But perhaps what has resonated most with Asian viewers of Kim’s Convenience is that this series—an oasis where integration, not mere tolerance, is standard—exists at a time marked by bleak coverage about the hatred of our community.
It has become impossible to separate watching Kim’s Convenience from the recent rise in anti-Asian racism, not least because members of its cast have done their part by releasing their own PSAs about the issue. Liu wrote an op-ed for Variety and Yoon a Twitter thread; both told stories about those who claim anti-Asian racism doesn’t exist while decrying incidents that were making the news at the time—the attack that eventually led to Vicha Ratanapakdee’s death in San Francisco, and the fatal shooting of eight, six of whom were Asian women, in Atlanta-area spas. The incidence of anti-Asian hate crimes taking over the news cycle has lessened since March, but that doesn’t mean these crimes aren’t still happening—recent numbers from activist organization Stop AAPI Hate say that reported incidents increased significantly during March 2021.
Kim’s features Asians of every stripe, and from every socioeconomic class. Its cancellation means more than losing another feel-good show—even though cocreator and former Schitt’s Creek writer Kevin White is planning a spinoff show that will focus on Shannon, Jung’s girlfriend and boss. That series won’t really be able to replace its predecessor, and not just because it won’t center a fully nonwhite cast. Losing Kim’s Convenience means losing another series, maybe the last one airing with a global audience, where Asian lives are the norm. We can only hope there will be more to come.
— A First Look at Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon
— 15 Summer Movies Worth Returning to Theaters For
— Why Evan Peters Needed a Hug After His Big Mare of Easttown Scene
— Shadow and Bone Creators Break Down Those Big Book Changes
— The Particular Bravery of Elliot Page’s Oprah Interview
— Inside the Collapse of the Golden Globes
— Watch Justin Theroux Break Down His Career
— For the Love of Real Housewives: An Obsession That Never Quits
— From the Archive: The Sky’s the Limit for Leonardo DiCaprio
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.