‘Crazy Rich Asians’: 5 Hopes We Have for HBO’s Follow-Up Series

Just when we started giving up hope of a Crazy Rich Asians sequel, HBO announced the story would continue as a TV series, with Constance Wu and Henry Golding returning to play lovebirds Rachel Chu and Nick Young, Ronny Chieng reprising his role as Nick’s cousin Eddie Cheng, and Michelle Yeoh recurring as Nick’s wealthy mother, Eleanor Young, whom Rachel really had to work to win over when she and Nick traveled to Singapore together.

The series is starting production next year, so we figure the writers and producers have ample time to nail the details. Here’s what we hope for Crazy Rich Asians’ TV continuation.

1. TV’s Crazy Rich Asians provides a richer look at Singapore

While 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians marked a win for a type of Hollywood representation, critics, scholars, and activists argued it ignored the 15 percent of people in Singapore who are Malay and the 6.6 percent who are Indian, as The Guardian reported at the time.

“The few brown people featured in it are seen in service positions to the glamorous and wealthy Chinese characters,” said activist Sangeetha Thanapal, for example. “The dominance of East Asia in the worldwide imagination of who constitutes the idea of Asia is troubling, especially since brown Asians make up a sizable portion of the continent.”

Director Jon M. Chu said at a press conference that it was “not the movie to solve all representation issues” and was instead “a very specific movie, we have a very specific world, very specific characters.” But Chu told Business Insider in 2021 he wished he made South Asian characters in the film “more human” and that the critiques were “a learning experience” for him.

And so the Crazy Rich Asians TV series marks an opportunity to show a Singapore more recognizable to all those who live there, not just the East Asian 1% of the 1%.

2. The TV series doesn’t glamorize wealth

While we’re discussing the film’s “very specific world,” we should note the film skirts Singapore’s inequality gap to focus only on the ultra-wealthy. “This movie is opening smack in the middle of our ongoing conversations about privilege, poverty, and social mobility,” political scientist Dr. Ian Chong told the BBC in 2018. “It’s a stark juxtaposition and may come as a rude shock for some.”

When the film came out, BBC Business pointed out that the Asia-Pacific region hosts the most millionaires and billionaires in the world but also nearly two-thirds of the world’s working poor.

We don’t need Crazy Rich Asians to become an “eat the rich” story — this is a rom-com franchise, after all — but we bet the TV series could do more than just gawk at shiny sports cars, palatial estates, and designer couture through an uncritical lens.

3. Gemma Chan and Harry Shum Jr. continue the storyline the film’s credits promised

In a tag seen midway through the film’s end credits, Nick’s cousin Astrid Young Teo (Gemma Chan) smiles after locking eyes with a character played by Harry Shum Jr. and known to readers of Kwan’s books as Charlie Wu.

Chu explained to Entertainment Weekly at the time that Charlie played a bigger role in Crazy Rich Asian’s original storyline, but his role was reduced to make sure audiences understood Astrid was leaving her philandering husband for herself, not for another man.

Still, Chu was excited to explore Astrid and Charlie’s storyline more. “It was just so fun to see the possibility,” he told the magazine. “There’s a lot of gold there to mine, and I hope we get the opportunity.”

Then, in 2022, Deadline reported Warner Bros. was in early development on a Crazy Rich Asians spinoff centered on Astrid and Charlie’s love story. In lieu of that spinoff, we hope the TV series will at least feature the duo as guest stars and give Astrid a romantic ending.

4. Awkwafina, Ken Jeong, and Nico Santos return — with more to do

Crazy Rich Asians gave some of our favorite TV stars a chance to join a glitzy Hollywood blockbuster, including Girl Code’s Awkwafina, Community’s Ken Jeong, and Superstore’s Nico Santos. Awkwafina played Peik Lin Goh, Rachel’s best friend; Jeon portrayed Wye Mun Goh, Peik Lin’s wealthy father; and Santos played Oliver T’sien, a second cousin of Nick’s and a fast friend for Peik Lin.

All three actors got some scene-stealing moments, but a two-hour film could only grant them so much coverage. With the breathing room that an eight-episode TV series affords, we hope producers not only hire the trio for guest-starring roles but to give them weighty storylines and not just wisecracks.

5. Adele Lim and other women of color get paid fairly

In September 2019, when a Crazy Rich Asians sequel film was still in development, The Hollywood Reporter announced screenwriter Adele Lim had exited the project because of a pay gap between her and co-writer Peter Chiarelli, with whom she scripted the first film. Sources told THR Warner Bros. gave starting offers of $110,000-plus for Lim and $800,000 to $1 million for Chiarelli, a more experienced Hollywood scribe.

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“Being evaluated that way can’t help but make you feel that is how they view my contributions,” Lim told the outlet. “Pete has been nothing but incredibly gracious, but what I make shouldn’t be dependent on the generosity of the white-guy writer,” she says. “If I couldn’t get pay equity after CRA, I can’t imagine what it would be like for anyone else, given that the standard for how much you’re worth is having established quotes from previous movies, which women of color would never have been [hired for]. There’s no realistic way to achieve true equity that way.”

Now Lim is the showrunner of the Crazy Rich Asians TV series and seems happy in the post — “Getting to work with the original creative team with the support and vision of HBO and Warner Bros. Television has been a dream,” she said in a statement — so we can guess she’s getting paid a satisfactory amount. We hope the same can be said for other women of color working on the series.

Crazy Rich Asians, TBD, HBO