NBC’s aborted comedy of a bought Filipina bride reveals the depths regarding the entertainment industry’s cultural blindness.

October 5, 2016

Whenever NBC announced the other day t he news was met with stunned disbelief that it had purchased a new half-hour comedy called Mail Order Family. Loosely centered on writer-producer Jackie Clarke’s life, the show would be to feature a household whoever > that is w , followed by online petitions to cancel the show. Because the outcry mounted, NBC announced on Friday so it would cancel the show, saying so it had “taken the sensitiveness towards the initial concept to heart.”

Exactly just How achieved it also arrive at this aspect? Numerous individuals revealed, there is absolutely no world where the mail-order bride industry may be presented as harmless, not to mention funny. Gabriela United States Of America, a feminist Filipina alliance that petitioned for Mail purchase Family’s termination, noted that it’s a market where ladies who “are economically disadvantaged and living in poverty” are “forced into intercourse slavery and mail-order-bride.net/ukrainian-brides domestic servitude.” Other people feared that the show would just compound the stereotype of Asian ladies as subservient, sexualized things, particularly because this may be the dream that propels lots of men to select this path within the place that is first.

On her behalf component, Clarke insisted that the mail-order bride when you look at the show will be a “fully recognized” and “strong activated character.” The show, most likely, ended up being prompted by her very own youth, which she recounts in a 2012 bout of This American Life. In Clarke’s telling, her widowed dad had provided through to dating US ladies (“all chunky broads hunting for a husband”) and made a decision to buy a spouse rather. Read more