TVSquad

Quick. Name a network television show, other than Margaret Cho's All-American Girl, that featured Asian-Americans in all of the lead roles. Sure, you can find a handful of Korean-Americans in the ensemble casts of Lost and Survivor, and the animated Long family rules the roost on the Disney's Channel's American Dragon. But, not since Cho's short-lived 1994 series has there been an entire show constructed around the trials and tribulations of Asian-American characters. On December 26th, that may change.

PBS affiliates around the country are debuting the series My Life...Disoriented, a Degrassi-style high school drama about sisters Kimberlee and Aimee Fung. The girls' lives are turned upside down when they move from San Francisco to a largely white neighborhood in Bakersfield, California. The show was created by Five Dollar Martini Productions - a partnership which includes three Asian-American women including actress Di Quon.

There's only one hitch in My Life...Disoriented's plan for world domination. It hasn't gotten much of a promotional push from PBS and is scheduled in the crappiest possible time slots by some affiliates. So, if you're so inclined, you can help get this scrappy operation off the ground by checking out the My Life...Disoriented website to find when it will air on your local PBS station. If it's not scheduled, call or write your affiliate and request that they pick up the show.

You can check out a couple of excerpts from the series on YouTube. Having watched them, I can say that, while the show won't blow you away, it's decent; the cast is great; and it deserves a place in the PBS teen pantheon. The show has a Degrassi-style charm, and picks up speed outside of the high school - where the interactions can be a bit contrived. The more specific the show is about its characters, location and perspective, the better it is. There's a nice scene at the end of the second clip which features goth cousin Phil explaining the never-ending joys of Bakersfield - like its cat zoo - and the reason he's gone goth - so people will stare at him for his spiked hair and eyeliner rather than his freckled-Asian face. You can imagine these characters growing up into the post-collegiate denizens of comic author Derek Kirk Kim's Same Difference and Other Stories, which is reason enough to like them.