Hardly anyone has seen the best fantasy series of the year – even though it has incredible action scenes and runs on a major streaming service

We live in a time that is both a blessing and a curse for series fans. More than 100 new series and seasons start every month, inviting you to binge on TV and on the various streaming services. But this diversity also has its downside: numerous series pearls are completely lost in the crowd.

One victim of the series oversupply is American Born Chinese, a fantasy series recently launched on Disney+, based on a hit graphic novel and starring Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan from Everything Everywhere All at Once even has two Oscar stars in the cast. It is all the more surprising that hardly anyone watches them.

The series did not even have 10 ratings two weeks after it started on Moviepilot. This is completely undeserved. Because American Born Chinese is a fantastic series highlight that neither fantasy nor action fans should miss.

Fantasy highlight at Disney+: American Born Chinese unleashes battle of the gods

The plot of American Born Chinese is vaguely reminiscent of a variation on Percy Jackson – Thieves in Olympus – in this case with Deities and legendary figures from Chinese mythology.

Here it is the Asian-American teenager Jin Wang (Ben Wang) who, between school stress, emotional chaos and his parents’ troubled marriage, is suddenly confronted with Chinese deities fighting in the hallways of his high school.

The reason for this is the Chinese exchange student Wei-Chen (Jim Liu), who bursts into Jin’s life. This claims that he Son of the Monkey King Sun Wukong (Daniel Wu, known from Into the Badlands) and wants to find a mysterious scroll with the help of Jin to prevent a riot in heaven. Sounds like a very vivid imagination? Jin thinks so too, but soon learns otherwise.

American Born Chinese is a furious fantasy mix full of weird ideas

American Born Chinese is an unusual series. Different genres and tones collide in it and the result is something special that creatively gets to the heart of the cultural contrasts that Jin unites.

Here coming-of-age drama about an immigrant child meets shrill fantasy with crashing martial arts action and absolutely weird ideas. A goddess of mercy in a consumer frenzy, a monk who has been drunk for thousands of years and a dog that eats gems are just a few of the funny ideas that American Born Chinese comes up with.

The staging is just as wacky with different image formats and styles plays. Scenes from a fictitious 90s sitcom (with Ke Huy Quan as an embarrassing clichéd Asian) are interspersed again and again, making the laughter stick in your throat. A flashback episode, on the other hand, becomes a grandiose, trashy retro homage to the Japanese cult series Monkey or Saiyūki from the 70s.

American Born Chinese’s biggest surprise, however, is the incredible action scenes, which eclipse everything that recent action series like Netflix’s FUBAR and Amazon’s Citadel have delivered.

The fantasy highlight surprises with unbelievable action

Each of the eight 30-minute episodes (directed by Shang Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton and Lucy Liu, among others) boasts at least one fantastic fantasy fight sequence. With maximum dynamics, witty ingenuity and gravity-defying moves, the fights will capture the hearts of any fan Wuxia fantasy and Hong Kong action beat faster.

Would you like an example? Action icon Michelle Yeoh’s deity Guanyin, who masquerades as Wei-Chen’s aunt on Earth, is attacked at her home by the evil bull demon. Dressed in a jogging suit, she hurls her body across the room and during the fight tries to keep her coffee table, which she has just bought from Ikea, from being destroyed.

American Born Chinese is weird, funny and tells a profound story with several levels of interpretation in all the chaos. It is all the more tragic that this serial gem hardly gets any attention. Better ban another mediocre Netflix series from your watch list and give this stylish fantasy trip a shot instead.

Podcast for series fans: 13 fantasy highlights starting this year on Netflix, Disney+ and more

Netflix, Disney+, Amazon and Co. have several exciting fantasy series in the starting blocks for the coming months. Whether ghost detectives, German myths with villainous heroes or the real-life anime series for One Piece and Avatar: We present the next 13 highlights to you.

Alongside The Witcher season 3, the angel-devil duo from Good Omens are also returning to the stream for a season 2 after four years. You can also discover a few promising fantasy series that you probably haven’t heard of until now.

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