Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens’ On Comedy Central, Where Awkwafina Is A Less Successful Version Of Herself

Awkwafina (originally known as Nora Lum) is on a hell of a roll in 2019-20. She hosted SNL. She got a Golden Globe for The Farewell. And now she’s got her own sitcom, based loosely on her Queens upbringing. But in this show, Nora is just Nora, and she doesn’t have a job. Read on for more…

AWKWAFINA IS NORA FROM QUEENS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman wakes up and finds herself floating in the clouds; she talks to God (who sounds a lot like Laverne Cox), and God asks why she’s still living with her dad and grandmother when “you’re almost 30.” The woman lies and says she’s on sabbatical from her PhD. God says she knows she’s lying; she was giving her a test. “Hm… guess what else is a test? You being a bitch,” the woman tells God.

The Gist: Nora Lum (Awkwafina) is about to get sent straight to hell, when her Grandma (Lori Tann Chin) wakes her up. Nora is in her mid-to-late-20s, and she hasn’t really made a ton of effort to move out of her childhood home in Queens, where she lives in a messy room — Grandma calls her a “hoarder” — with Grandma and her dad (BD Wong). She’s just been kicked out of a dental assistants’ training class. When she asks her dad if she’s a loser, he says she’s not, but then compares her to her cousin Edmund, who bought an apartment building in cash.

Nora decides it’s time to take the bull by the horns and move out. Her lawyer friend Chenise (Makeda Declet) is offering her a place to crash in her sweet new apartment, but she tells Nora not to go into the second bedroom because there’s black mold. She also signs up to drive her flame-clad Honda Fit for ride sharing service, but gets the boot when one of her customers gets run over by a bike messenger while leaving Nora’s car in a panic.

Out of boredom, she goes into the bedroom Chenise said was off limits, and finds out that her friend is making her money as a cam girl. After she confronts Chenise about it, her friend invites her to join in, posing as a literal “Dragon Lady,” i.e. in a dragon costume. But the costume’s tail gets caught in a candle and Nora ends up burning Chenise’s apartment down, just as she has something she could proudly tell Dad, Grandma, and her app-rich cousin (Bowen Yang). She moves back in with her family after getting her car towed, where she was sleeping… sans pants.

Our Take: We’ve seen how funny Awkwafina can be, and she just won a Golden Globe for the movie The Farewell. So there was going to be a pretty good chance that Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens would have her millennial-crossed-with-traditional viewpoint. The show turned out to be exactly that. But what we enjoyed about the first episode is that the Nora we see padding around in a robe in her grandmother’s house doesn’t seem far off from the Nora that became Awkwafina, despite her fast-rising stardom.

Awkwafina, as you might imagine, is an executive producer of the series, along with Karey Dornetto, Peter Principato, and Itay Reiss, with Dornetto being the showrunner. Even though the show pings from scene to scene, adding in animated interstitials, the episodes tell a coherent story. The vibe is similar to Broad City, where we’re going to see Nora navigate living in New York as a 20-something. But her experience is going to be a whole lot different than Abbi and Ilana’s, mainly because her family background is different than theirs. We’re just starting to see more Asian representation in movies and TV, so any insight into how a millennial floats through her life trying to figure things out when her family is loving but has high expectations will be interesting to watch.

The show and Awkwafina aren’t trying to be funny. There are thrown-off jokes and funny sight gags, like her pixelated naked crotch when she gets out of her car, but she’s done herself a ton of favors by surrounding herself with pros like Wong, Chinn and Yang (Yang is currently on SNL, as well). He’ll get more involved later in the season when he moves back to New York and Nora moves in with him, which should be a fun dynamic to explore.

Sex and Skin: Aside from the pixelated crotch, there isn’t any of either. Even the cam stuff Nora and Cherise were doing were more of the cosplay/kinky/weirdo variety.

Parting Shot: Nora cleans her room, and even finds her favorite album, by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (it’s really her dad’s). She claims to be Marie Kondo-ing, but she opens her closet, embraces the junk falling out and says, “I’ll never leave you. I love you.”

Sleeper Star: Chinn is hilarious as Grandma, especially when saying things like “Now lift up that camera; I can see your pubic patch.”

Most Pilot-y Line: Maybe when she crouches down while driving someone to look for her Israel Kamakawiwo’ole CD, and she just nonchalantly pulls out a vibrator as she’s looking. Nah, that’s pretty funny.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Awkwafina is pretty funny in Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens. But so is the rest of the cast, and she grounds her comedy by concentrating on her family.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

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