Bed of Roses - ABCTV

 
Caught a snippet of this last night before I headed out. Bed of Roses is a (country-town) Australian drama shot in South Gippsland . It has a similar feel to SeaChange.

Season One aired in 2008 and Season Two started airing in February this year. There are still three episodes left to air from this season and you can find earlier episodes on iView.

Season One had one main Asian character, Rita Lim (played by Haiha Le), who is the restaurant and mini-market manager. Her bf is white.

In Season Two, Chin Tsun Chi (played by Gareth Yuen) arrives on the scene and manages to romance Rita and free her from the white douche  - I'm guessing this is what happened.

It's good to see an All-Asian couple and there are actually two if you include Rita's parents (the mum dissaproved of the white guy hahahaha).

A couple of things that bothered me (surprise surprise):
1. Chin is from overseas so he speaks thick, accented English. He is also really into the spiritual stuff about offerings(?) and incense. The scene that I watched wanted to make me punch his face in. He was telling his gf in a really serious tone that he must appease his ancestor or some crap like that, I mean who (amongst young ppl) does that nowadays? Add to that his cringeworthy Asian-accented English.  Gareth is AA so I found it hard to stomach the accent.

Gareth Yuen is one of my fave AA actors because there aren't many. I first noticed him on Head Start when I was in Uni.  I mean here was this young Asian guy on TV and NOT speaking accented English.  He was someone I could sort of relate to, although he was way too much of a computers man.  The show got even more interesting when he started dating Clare, a whitey.  But that was nearly ten years ago, you would never see that stuff on TV these days.  Gareth also played a Power Ranger - yeah!  I saw him on Kath and Kim playing the waiter on the tram restaurant, love the stereotype.

2. Have a look at "Meet the Locals" summary on the Bed of Roses page. Not one of them is Asian and yet Jay Laga'aia, the Pacific Islander, is on there. The rest are all white.

Apart from the above minor points, the show doesn't look that bad and Rita speaks fluent english and is a likable character. - I'm basing this on watching 5 mins of the show.  It's GREAT to see an all-Asian couple.

To see the part  I saw, click on Episode 5 and fast forward to 20:50.

Another interesting part is at 17:50 where Chin and Rita visit the Chinese Museum in Melbourne to track down his ancestor.