Nora (Awkwafina, the comedian, rapper and movie star — “The Farewell,” “Crazy Rich Asians”) lives at home in Flushing with her grandma (Lori Tan Chinn, “Orange Is the New Black”) and her dad (BD Wong, most recently, “Mr. Robot”). She’s struggling to figure stuff out, or how to move out, but jobs are hard to come by. At least grandma and dad are patient. This series — which Comedy Central just handed a second season to — is based on the life of Nora Lum, aka Awkwafina.
MY SAY: “Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens” poses one of the great questions of our time, specifically this one: Will millennials watch a TV show with commercials in it?
You probably remember those kind of shows. They “air” on “commercial networks” and were the sort of shows everyone used to watch, until shows started to stream, and cords started to get cut, and millennials fell off the Nielsen radar. The world changes fast, really fast, and even “Broad City” feels like some relic from a distant age. That, by the way, ended just last year.
In some ways, “Awkwafina” is the next “Broad City,” full of the same vitality, the same dislocation in the same city, where “gigs” rule and a steady paycheck is for parents (or grandparents), and hardly for someone who’s still trying to find themselves at the age of 27.