Kim’s Convenience on Netflix shows how immigration is a two-way street
The cultural-assimilation comedy avoids sterotypes to reset mindsets about both the immigrant story and those of weird locals
That’s where “Appa” Kim (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) has been marooned by his career of choice, but without having to boldly go anywhere he discovers all sorts of strange life forms: photography students, homosexuals, Christians, a gender-neutral customer, a West Indian woman … all baffle the irascible but well-meaning Mr Kim, a Korean transplant to Toronto, Canada, and his God-fearing wife, “Umma” (Jean Yoon), who is only slightly less 1950s in her attitudes than her husband.
Kim blunders through one boneheaded misconception after another while giving only mild, unintentional offence as he inadvertently skewers the politically correct sacred cow of the day.
A comedy of cultural assimilation, Kim’s Convenience avoids easy stereotypes to show that immigration is a two-way street: the natives graciously accept, eventually, while the second-generation imports adapt, quickly. Their parents take a little longer.
Drop by Kim’s and join the fun … at your convenience.
HBO’s Run comes to screens with all the twists and turns expected from the minds behind Fleabag
Perhaps the reason love is so exhausting is that there’s so much running involved: running to or away from someone or towards a brighter future (possibly) than the one destiny had in mind for you.
But no matter how far the plane or how fast the train, can you run backwards to the past? That’s the question with which Ruby (Merritt Wever) and Billy (Domhnall Gleeson) wrestle – largely unsuccessfully – as they run away together in Run (HBO and HBO Go, Mondays at 10.30am; reruns on HBO at 11.30pm).
In more innocent times it might have been said that they were eloping, but that’s much too romantic a term for a joint venture that throws all manner of emotional and logistical spanners in the works. At first it seems noble that two former college sweethearts should honour their pact, made 17 years earlier, to drop everything if one should send the text message “RUN” to the other and the other reply likewise. Meeting at Grand Central Terminal, New York, they would then travel across the United States.
So far, so Brief [Re-] Encounter; this, however, is more Source Code meets Strangers on a Train. She realises that she has been ridiculously rash and that leaving behind an entire life and all its entanglements isn’t easy. He seems to be the target of a stalker and suspicion grows that he has engineered the whole escapade.
She’s cantankerous and conflicted; he’s neurotic and casually cruel – romance isn’t supposed to be like this, full of explosive arguments, tit-for-tat caustic humour and narrative swerves that keep the viewer off balance. As wannabe teens tasting midlife crises they are incompetent runaways; failed heroic figures finding that the ties that bind are really tripwires.
The story ducks and dives, which you might expect from a show with its antecedents: Run was written and produced by Vicky Jones, who, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, founded the company responsible for the often disconcertingly restless Fleabag. (And look out for Waller-Bridge herself in surprising guise.)
As the train rolls on so do the shocks, the most dismaying for the erstwhile lovers being that they cannot, in fact, go back because they are no longer the people they used to be. And because the only things about them that seem to have stayed the same are the annoying bits.
