Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 328

Fresh Off the Boat and the Revolutionary Act of Kissing

For most Americans, seeing the manic doctor Ken Park kiss his wife, Allison, on the new ABC comedy Dr. Ken, or watching the semi-successful restauranteur Louis Huang smooch his better half, Jessica, on the returning hit Fresh Off the Boat is nothing remarkable. Sitcom parents have engaged in public displays of affection on primetime for as long as there have been family sitcoms, after all.

More From Quartz Hollywood’s Come a Long Way, Baby—But It’s Definitely Not a Meritocracy Whether or Not Fresh Off the Boat Is Renewed, the Pioneering Sitcom Has Changed Network TV If Asian Americans Saw White Americans the Way White Americans See Black Americans

But for those of us who grew up with parents born and raised in Asia—and, based on a 2012 Pew survey, that’s a growing number of us—these lip-lock moments are mind-blowing. Because not only have we rarely seen Asian American parents kiss on TV, many of us have never seen them do it in real life either.

It’s not necessarily because our parents don’t love each other. Yes, many immigrant parents are together out of pragmatism rather than passion—betrothed by family, bonded by shared work and responsibility, or beholden to custom and tradition. But behind the codependency (and occasional squabbling) that marks many immigrant-parent relationships is often a surprising depth of affection—and yes, even romance.

My mother, shortly before I left home for college, shared with me how she and my dad first met: He was a young physician-in-training, and as she prepared to come to the U.S. for graduate school, she was helping to manage her family’s business (a neighborhood newspaper-distribution service). His path to the hospital went by their office, and he would regularly sit on their stoop, reading from the stacks and racks of publications without purchasing anything.

Day after day, my mom was sent to go shoo him away—until eventually he got up the nerve to explain that he wasn’t actually there for the free newspapers, he was just finding an excuse to talk to her. (She later said that, in retrospect, she thinks he really was there for the free newspapers. But she was charmed by his words regardless; enough that they’ve been married for nearly half a century, anyway.)

Of course, my sister and I didn’t see that side of their relationship. My parents are task mates and complementary life partners—even more now that they’re older. But they never kissed, or hugged, or held hands, or snuggled on the couch when we were growing up. They rarely expressed that kind of physical affection with us either; quick goodbye hugs and hesitant pecks on the cheek for special occasions were more their style. Affection came in the form of food, copious amounts of it, and high expectations: “If I didn’t care about you, I wouldn’t be so convinced you could do better.” You see that sensibility in Louis and Jessica’s parenting of their three boys (including my real-life son, Hudson, who plays the eldest kid, Eddie).

Not only have we rarely seen Asian American parents kiss on TV, many of us have never seen them do it in real life either.

But you also see them sharing quiet, tender moments, talking about their personal history (sometimes a bit too intimately!) and yes, hugging, cuddling, and kissing. And from the very first episode of Dr. Ken, which aired just last Friday, between Ken and his wife Allison, you see even more—the kind of sly banter and verbal flirtation that suggests they have more than just a domestic collaboration, but a sex life that’s active and healthy enough to gross out their adolescent children.

Which for Asian Americans watching prime-time television is a shocking new frontier. We know our parents had sex (well, most of us do; in a Twitter discussion after Dr. Ken aired, the Korean American film and TV writer Young-Il Kim said that based on what he saw of his parents growing up, he assumed his birth had been the product of immaculate conception); we’ve just never seen that depicted, even by way of innuendo, on primetime television.

Will wonders never cease? We’re poised to soon see even other aspects of life, love, and relationships depicted from our community’s traditionally absent perspective: In Fresh Off the Boat, Eddie has already had his first schoolboy crush, his first heartbreak, and in upcoming episodes, he’ll have his first date … and first girlfriend. It’s all an example of how this new wave of diversity in Hollywood is the gift that keeps on giving, sweeping aside the stereotypes and caricatures of the past, and leaving in their place something that all of us can recognize, regardless of where we come from and who we are: our humanity.

A Near Miss Over Syria

A U.S. military aircraft flying over Syria was recently forced to change its route to avoid coming “dangerously close” to Russian warplanes, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis told the Associated Press that U.S. air operations have had to be adjusted since Russia launched an air campaign targeting extremist groups in Syria last week. Davis would not say how many times the military has rerouted aircraft.

A U.S.-led coalition has launched near-daily strikes against Islamic State militants in Syria since last summer. Russia joined in a week ago, citing the threat of the Islamic State, but news reports and U.S. officials suggest its focus has been on striking rebel groups, some of which are backed by the West, that are fighting the Syrian government, a longtime ally of Moscow. As my colleague Kathy Gilsinan put it last week, “Putins’ terrorists aren’t the same as Obama’s.”

A day after Russia’s bombing began, U.S. and Russian officials met via videoconference for “deconfliction” talks, the clinical term for ensuring one country’s warplanes don’t collide with another’s.

On Monday, Turkey said Russian warplanes illegally entered its airspace, an occurrence NATO’s secretary general later said “doesn’t look like an accident.” On Wednesday, Russia fired 26 medium-range cruise missiles into Syria from four warships stationed 1,000 miles away in the Caspian Sea. Its defense ministry said it successfully struck 11 targets.

No-Drama Nicki Minaj

‘‘Why would a grown-ass woman thrive off drama?’’

That’s the question Nicki Minaj posed to the writer Vanessa Grigoriadis shortly before she threw her out of the hotel room where they’d been chatting for a New York Times Magazine profile. Grigoriadis had asked about public feuds between Minaj’s boyfriend Meek Mill and her labelmate Drake, and between her mentor Lil Wayne and their label boss Birdman—and proposed, tentatively, that Minaj might enjoy the squabbling between the guys around her.

“What do the four men you just named have to do with me thriving off drama?” Minaj continued. “Why would you even say that? That’s so peculiar. Four grown-ass men are having issues between themselves, and you’re asking me do I thrive off drama?”

In the article where this is all documented, Grigoriadis writes that her mistake had been one of terminology: “In pop-culture idiom, ‘drama’ is the province of Real Housewives with nothing better to do than stick their noses where they don’t belong. I was more interested in a different kind of drama—the kind worthy of an HBO series, in which your labelmate is releasing endless dis tracks against your boyfriend and your mentor is suing your label president for a king’s ransom.”

But reading Minaj’s words, it certainly sounds as though the rapper understood the kind of drama Grigoriadis was referring to. She simply thought the suggestion that she thrived off of it was a condescending one, one that fed into the tropes of a woman sewing discord in men or cleaning up their messes, and one that implied that her whole personality was silly, fake, a Hollywood caricature. “You know that’s not just a stupid question,” Minaj told Grigoriadis. “That’s a premeditated thing you just did.’’

The entire article, the cover of this week’s Times magazine, uses the same kind of language that Grigoriadis suggests was responsible for the confrontation—“the pop-culture idiom.” The story’s first sentence establishes that Minaj shall be evaluated for the next few-thousand words as part of the archetype of “the female star—Beyoncé, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and, as always, Madonna” who feature in a “national telenovela ... feeding the public information about her paramours, ex-paramours, peccadilloes, and beefs, all of it delivered in social media’s short, sharp bursts.”

This is a traditional way of thinking about female performers: mainly in the context of other female performers. Swift, Perry, Minaj, et al. are, supposedly, calculated climbers who smile together for the cameras but secretly hunger to be the uncontested Queen of Pop. The warring-women stereotype has also often been called out as limiting and sexist, but it’s undeniable that stars themselves often play into it—talking in interviews about how there’s no rivalry at all while trumpeting their album sales and making comments that seem to dis the rest of their field. (This phenomenon, of course, is just a result of human self expression and competitive drive—not limited to women, or even to famous people.)

When people say Minaj is “not kind” or loves “drama,” they are assuming that Minaj wants to play by the rules of pop stardom.

One of the many things that make Nicki Minaj fascinating is how she defies this paradigm. When she “throws shade”—at males or females or, more often, at culture more broadly—it’s not through innuendo in the style of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” (maybe about Katy Perry). It’s through bracing and hilarious call-outs, whether on the VMAs stage or in a song with the self-explanatory title “Stupid Hoe.” When she addresses rumors, it’s not through coy song titles like (to use another Swift example) “Dear John” (maybe about John Mayer). It’s by literally rapping a line like “I never fucked Wayne, I never fucked Drake.” This bluntness is not, as some people would suggest, artless or unthinking. It’s a trait of an art form that at its best is pointed and hyperreal and very memorable—hip-hop, not pop.

Oh, right: Minaj is a rapper. Grigoriadis’s article, to its credit, aptly traces how Minaj achieved stardom after working her way up in the hip-hop world. (An important part of the Minaj legend, and many legends in the field, is the selling-CDs-out-of-the-back-of-a-car phase, though Minaj apparently does not indulge questions about the specifics of that period in her life.) Her status as a rapper is not just a matter of biographical trivia, or even of how she delivers her lyrics. It’s a matter of her outlook. Hip-hop, which rose from and reflects a social condition characterized by constant peril, doesn’t fetishize go-along get-along niceness to settle disputes. The best rappers, from Ice Cube to Jay Z, have often proven themselves through straightforward but brutally clever verbal confrontation. Not many women have thrived in this space before, a fact that—as Grigoriadis’s profile attests—forced Minaj to be tougher than she would otherwise have to be:

… her manager at the time, Debra Antney, who was born in Jamaica, Queens, before becoming an Atlanta hip-hop matriarch (and also the rapper Waka Flocka Flame’s mother), says, “Nicki was the timidest little girl you’d ever want to see in your life—she was so broken up, but she was so determined, all in one breath.” Timid? “I used to have to scream at her: ‘You’re not going to sit here and cry, you’re not going to let nobody shut you down, that’s what you’re not going to do.’”

Of course, by a lot of measures, Minaj is a star in the same realm as Madonna’s descendants. Her music has certainly annoyed hip-hop purists for indulging in trends that please the pop charts. But the author John Seabrook, quoted in the Times article, sounds as though he’s never heard one of Minaj’s gloriously dissonant, sui generis albums in full when he says she’s “a vocal actor not asked to say something that’s profound but rather play a role in a song that someone else has written.” A few choruses per CD aside, very few people are making music that quite sounds like Minaj’s. And no one else is cutting a public figure like her, with the same political concerns—also outlined in the Times piece—regarding body types, financial independence for women, and race.

So when Miley Cyrus laments that Minaj is “not too kind,” when Taylor Swift raises alarm about her appearing to “pit women against each other,” and when Grigoriadis wonders if she loves drama, they’re making category errors, assuming that Minaj seeks to operate by the rules of pop stardom. Ditto for when Grigoriadis says it’s surprising that Minaj would want to turn her difficult childhood into an ABC Family show—the struggle, the process of toughening up, are essential parts of her art. And again for when Grigoriadis writes that “This was not the game Minaj was here to play—interviews in the social-media era are about being adored, not interrogated.” Minaj is worried about a lot of things, but adoration might be the least of them.

Calls for an International Investigation Into Kunduz Airstrike

Updated on October 7 at 1:52 p.m.

President Obama has apologized to Doctors Without Borders (MSF) for the U.S. airstrike on its medical facility in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 22 people.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama spoke to Dr. Joanne Liu, MSF’s international president, and offered his condolences to MSF staff and patients killed in the attack. He told Liu there would be a thorough accounting of the incident, Earnest said.

Earlier Wednesday, Liu said MSF wants a never-before-used mechanism of the Geneva Conventions to investigate the airstrike.

“The U.S. attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz was the biggest loss of life for our organization in an airstrike,” she said in Geneva. “Tens of thousands of people in Kunduz can no longer receive medical care now when they need it most. Today we say: enough. Even war has rules.”

MSF wants the airstrike to be investigated by an International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission—established in the Additional Protocols of the Geneva Conventions. The commission, which was set up in 1991, is the only permanent body that specifically investigates violations of international humanitarian law.

“The tool exists and it is time it is activated,” Liu said.

The body’s rules state one of 76 signatory states must sponsor an inquiry. But for one to get formally underway, it must be endorsed by the parties to the conflict, in this case the U.S. and Afghanistan. Neither country is likely to support such a move.

Liu added:

We ask signatory states to activate the commission to establish the truth and to reassert the protected status of hospitals in conflict.

It is unacceptable that States hide behind ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ and in doing so create a free for all and an environment of impunity. It is unacceptable that the bombing of a hospital and the killing of staff and patients can be dismissed as collateral damage or brushed aside as a mistake.

Today we are fighting back for the respect of the Geneva Conventions. As doctors, we are fighting back for the sake of our patients. We need you, as members of the public, to stand with us to insist that even wars have rules.

MSF’s demand for an investigation comes a day after General John Campbell, the senior-most U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told a Senate committee that the hospital was “mistakenly struck.” He said the decision to strike the hospital “was made within the U.S. chain of command.”

As my colleague David Graham pointed out, Campbell’s remarks were part of a evolving line on the airstrike in Kunduz, the city captured by the Taliban last week before Afghan government forced retook it.

Following the airstrike Saturday, a U.S. military spokesman said there might have been “collateral damage” to a nearby hospital, but there was no acknowledgment of hitting the facility. Then, Defense Secretary Ash Carter acknowledged the MSF hospital had been struck, calling it a “tragic” accident. Then on Monday, Campbell said Afghan forces had requested the airstrike. Finally, on Tuesday, Campbell acknowledged that while the Afghans had requested the strike, the final decision went up the U.S. military’s chain of command.

Here’s David’s account of the changing narratives:

To recap, the U.S. first speculated that there might be collateral damage; then said the strike had been an accident; then blamed Afghans; and now has admitted the final decision sat with U.S. officials. A certain amount of confusion is unsurprising—the fog of war makes it tough to immediately determine what happened. But it looks bad for the official story to keep changing, and it’s bad news that the blame is moving closer to the U.S.—especially as Doctors Without Borders argues the airstrike was a war crime. MSF says U.S. and Afghan officials were informed of the exact location of the hospital.

To add to those shifting narratives, The New York Times is reporting that Campbell now believes U.S. troops “probably did not follow their own rules in calling in the airstrike” that destroyed the MSF hospital because no U.S. or Afghan troops were in extreme danger.

The airstrike killed 10 patients at the hospital and 12 MSF staff.

Exit, Blatter?

FIFA’s ethics committee has recommended that Sepp Blatter be suspended amid a Swiss criminal investigation into the president of soccer’s governing body, the BBC, Sky Sports, and others are reporting.

A decision on whether to act on the recommendation is likely to be made Thursday by Hans Joachim Eckert, FIFA’s ethics judge. He was the author of a widely criticized report that cleared Qatar and Russia of corruption in their successful bids to host the World Cup.

Blatter, as we have previously reported, faces allegations of criminal mismanagement and misappropriation during his presidency. According to the Swiss attorney general’s office, the allegations center on an “unfavorable contract” Blatter signed with the Caribbean Football Union in 2005. Blatter is also accused of making a “disloyal payment” to UEFA chief Michel Platini for work performed between January 1999 and June 2002.

Blatter, who denies all the charges against him, has refused to resign—even in the face of pressure from some of FIFA’s biggest corporate sponsors.

Wednesday’s suspension is the latest nail in Blatter’s professional coffin. Both he and FIFA have faced scrutiny for years. Those drumbeats became louder after the 2018 and 2022 World Cups were awarded to Russia and Qatar, respectively. They were capped in May by a joint U.S.-Swiss operation that resulted in the indictments and arrests of several FIFA executives in Zurich.

Blatter, who had just been re-elected to a fifth term as FIFA’s president—a position he has held since 1998—resigned, but said he’d stay on in the job until February 2016.

If a 90-day suspension takes effect Wednesday, it would mean Blatter will be back at work January 5, 2016—just days before the election to select the person who will succeed him.

Russia Is Really Just Showing Off in Syria at This Point

On Wednesday, Russia fired 26 medium-range cruise missiles into Syria. According to reports, the missiles, after traveling nearly 1,000 miles from four warships in the Caspian Sea through both Iran and Iraq, hit 11 different targets.

Which targets specifically? Following a week in which Russia has twice violated Turkish airspace and hit non-ISIS targets by air to the dismay of the United States and a number of its allies, Russian officials wouldn’t say. What Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu did say in a televised interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin is that all the targets had been destroyed and no civilian infrastructure had been damaged. (Russian state-run media reported the targets belonged to the Islamic State.)

“The intensity of strikes is growing,” Shoigu explained, noting that 112 targets have been hit since Russia started its airstrikes last week. This newest Russian escalation coincides with a ground offensive by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad, which is being coordinated with support from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, the Iran-back Shiite militant group that is based in Lebanon.

In many ways, this offensive doesn’t entirely appear to be about Syria. That the Russian missiles traveled through two countries to strike their targets is not only a show of military might, but also a projection of status. It was mostly the former that Putin sought to play up on Wednesday.

“That we fired from the territory of the Caspian Sea, at a range greater than 1,500 kilometers, and hit targets precisely, this shows high qualifications,” Putin said in the interview.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, ​the United States sought to further distance itself from Russia’s actions by ruling out any kind of strategic alliance with the country. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter, during a press briefing with Italy’s Defense Minister, explained:

We are not prepared to cooperate in strategy which, as we explained, is flawed, tragically flawed, on the Russians’ part. The U.S. is not cooperating with Russia in that regard.

Seizing Private Property Is No Problem for Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s latest spat with conservatives over eminent domain is surprising only because it took this long for it to erupt.

The billionaire real-estate mogul on Tuesday issued a gushing defense of allowing the government to seize private property to promote the public good, whether that means building a highway or partnering with a developer—such as himself—on projects that would create “thousands of jobs.”

“I think eminent domain is wonderful,” Trump told Bret Baier on Fox News. And why wouldn’t he? Over the course of his career in business, Trump has repeatedly asked the government to invoke eminent domain to clear land for his projects, whether it was a hotel parking lot (for limousines!) in Atlantic City, or an office and entertainment complex in Connecticut. Not to mention that Trump’s entire ethos is the political equivalent of a bulldozer. As for the people displaced by property seizing, Trump didn’t have much sympathy. It’s often just one “hold-out” out of a dozen who decide to sell their homes for much more than they’d otherwise be worth. “Don’t forget, they get a lot of money,” he said.

“You’re not taking that property,” Trump added. “You’re paying a fortune for that property. Those people can move two blocks away into a much nicer house.”

The trouble for Trump is that ever since the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the city of New London could turn over private property to another private company in support of economic development, the Republican right has considered eminent domain heretical. And true to form, Trump’s conservative critics pounced on his comments.

Appropriate that @realDonaldTrump will have to defend eminent domain comments today at Waterloo. Napoleon also a big fan of eminent domain.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 7, 2015

The conflict over eminent domain is yet another challenge to Trump’s shaky alliance with the GOP grassroots, which is far more libertarian than the business-friendly wing that has an increasingly tenuous hold on the party’s leadership in Washington. Trump has sounded populist notes by railing against “hedge fund guys” and the GOP donor class, but just like the tax plan he released last month, his support for eminent domain is another reminder that he’s no enemy of corporate power.

“At least there’s a crucial issue that Trump hasn’t flip-flopped on,” said Doug Sachtleben, spokesman for the Club for Growth, the conservative group Trump has been warring with for months. “Trump hasn’t wavered in his support of the terrible Kelo decision, and he still applauds the idea of developers getting rich while private property owners are forced out of their homes and businesses. It’s just continued proof that Trump is not a conservative.” Marco Rubio joined the pile-on as well, telling The Weekly Standard that Trump was “wrong” about eminent domain. “One of the most important rights Americans have is private property,” he said.

Trump said he understood the complaints but that the issue just “hasn’t been explained to most conservatives.” The Republican frontrunner isn’t shy about much of anything, but it’s probably a safe bet that his full-throated defense of the government’s right to private property won’t be added to his Iowa stump speech anytime soon.

Project Runway: Chanel Builds Itself an Airport

He’s done gardens. He’s done supermarkets. Now—and also again—Karl Lagerfeld is taking on airports. The head designer and creative director for Chanel is known for putting on fashion shows that blend spectacle and artistry and camp, shows that put the “conspicuous” in “conspicuous consumption.” His latest show, for Paris Fashion Week, carries on the tradition: It was set in an “airport terminal” re-constructed in Paris’s Grand Palais. Lagerfeld christened it the Chanel Airlines Terminal. It includes Gate “No. 5.”

Cue the “project runway” joke.

Benoit Tessier / Reuters

Cue, also, the irony. Lagerfeld’s continued interest in commercial air travel—his 2012 couture show was inspired by, and set inside, a reconstructed plane—is especially remarkable because, if the 2007 documentary Lagerfeld Confidential is to be believed, the designer resolutely flies private.

Francois Mori / AP

Nevertheless, the show offered an eloquent argument against that traditional bête noire of fashion designers: travel clothing. Which often involves some version of yoga pants, sweats, or jeans. In place of these comfy standbys, Lagerfeld offered suit sets in explosive, primary-colored plaids. And full skirts wrapped around even fuller pants. And boxy jackets in hot pink and royal blue. And accessories that included Lagerfeldian fingerless gloves and, because of course, red aviators.

Chanel, with the show, also took a more literal approach to the idea of “plane clothes”: Down Lagerfeld’s runway walked silver-and-black designs more reminiscent of an airplane than of any of the clothes that might be jetted around inside it.

Benoit Tessier / Reuters

Also on display, though, was the message that comes through in all of Chanel's over-the-top shows: the difficulty of gaining attention for one’s collection, even when the “one” in question is Karl Lagerfeld. The sense that clothes, in a crowded fashion marketplace, are not enough to make a splash—that something more is needed to win a big audience. (Remember when Chanel shipped a 265-ton glacier from Sweden for Lagerfeld’s 2010 show?)

Lagerfeld’s latest follows in that tradition: It insists that clothes double as art, and therefore that their unveiling deserves much more than a utilitarian runway. “Chanel Airlines Terminal” argues that fashion deserves, in fact, an art installation of its own.

An EU Mission to Stop Human Trafficking

The European Union is adopting a decidedly muscular approach to intercept the boats carrying migrants across the Mediterranean. It announced Wednesday the naval vessels will now “be able to board, search, seize, and divert vessels suspected of being used for human smuggling or trafficking on the high seas.”

The decision, which the bloc says is in line with international law, is a shift from the EU’s policy of surveillance and rescue, and it comes as Europe is coping with the most severe migrant crisis since World War II. So far this year, more than 500,000 people have crossed  the Mediterranean to enter Europe. Of those, nearly 3,000 have died making the often-perilous journey.

The EU said its new mission will be called Sophia for the baby who was rescued with her mother off the coast of Libya in August. The mission will allow naval vessels to seize any vessel suspected to be carrying migrants. It’s the second phase of the naval operation, which was previously called EUNAVFOR Med.

It’s unclear if the EU’s maritime efforts will have the intended results. The bloc has been unable to find a consensus on how to cope with the flow of migrants, many of whom are headed to Germany, which announced over the summer that it was suspending the bloc’s usual rules for asylum-seekers. Those rules mandate that asylum-seekers register in the first country they enter. The decision contributed not only to the increased flow of migrants, but also to some of the most-bitter divisions among states like Germany, which has opened its doors to the asylum-seekers, and Hungary, which has not.

The crisis is expected to be discussed when German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande address the European Parliament on Wednesday.

The Flash Is the Best Superhero Show Since Buffy the Vampire Slayer

If you strip away everything else, CW’s The Flash is about a guy who runs fast—his only power. Sometimes he runs so fast that he summons some sort of tornado; other times, he blasts through the time barrier itself. No matter what, Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) remains apple-cheeked and prone to seeing the bright side of things, even if the planet is on the brink of destruction. The CW superhero drama seems cut out of a simpler era where a hero fighting a villain of the week was all you needed to make a comic-book adaptation shine.

But The Flash’s real skill is in balancing that throwback feel with dense, yearlong storytelling arcs that frequently fold time on itself and feature villains from the distant future. Its first season, a huge ratings hit for the network, recalled the soapy early years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the best comparison a genre TV show could hope for. Like that show, it mixed small-change bad guys with a battle against a much bigger threat (resolved in a dramatic season finale). Even more importantly, it was about how heroes are defined by the support systems they build up around them. For all of its throwback charm, Barry’s blended family in The Flash—something Buffy had as well—was a quietly radical element in a genre that is usually anything but.

That emphasis on family continues into the second season, which premieres Tuesday on The CW. A supervillainous speedster killed Barry’s mother and framed his father for the crime when Barry was a child, so he was raised by a kind-hearted cop named Joe West (Jesse L. Martin). The show’s first season saw Barry given the power of supernatural speed, which he eventually used to uncover the identity of his mother’s killer. But in the second season, Joe remains a paternal figure, and his familial bond with Barry feels authentic. It would be easy for the show to reduce Joe to the role of wise African American mentor, but he’s a far more well-rounded figure. He acts a moral sounding board for Barry, but he’s also a father who’s often frustrated with the danger his son is in.

That’s where the Buffy comparison comes in. Joss Whedon’s revolutionary 1997 show was about a singular hero, but it was just as much about the ensemble around her that both informed and fed off her heroism. The Flash’s support crew includes the same archetypes: Buffy’s wise-cracking geek Xander takes the form of Cisco (Carlos Valdes), and the type-A know-it-all Willow seems reincarnated as Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker). Barry on his own is perfectly charming, but straightforwardly so: You’re rooting for him, but there’s not much drama to it, and his superpowers keep him at arm’s length. Mix in a team of lovable losers he has to protect, and he’s that much more human.

Buffy worked because it took its audience seriously while allowing itself to be silly. The Flash has some of that same spirit.

The Flash’s first season also perfectly imitated the classic Buffy structure, setting up a “big bad” in its first episode (the two-faced scientist Harrison Wells, played by Tom Cavanagh) and having his master plan slowly unfold over the course of 22 episodes before being vanquished, at a cost, in the season finale. It’s a structure Whedon borrowed from comic books themselves, where encounters with small-time foes (like the amusingly chintzy Captain Cold, played with dramatic relish by Wentworth Miller) feed into a larger battle on the horizon. In the first season’s finale, Barry defeated Harrison but lost an ally in the process; the season two premiere handles that trauma appropriately, without sacrificing the show’s overall sprightly tone.

When The CW launched as a merger of The WB and UPN (both of which aired Buffy) in 2006, it struggled for years to sustain the teen-focused brand of its predecessors. Only in recent years has it found a ratings groove by offering surprisingly complex genre dramas like The Vampire Diaries, Arrow, and The 100, which are mostly aimed at younger viewers. The Flash has attracted some of the best ratings in the network’s history because it balances all-ages appeal with institutional knowledge of what’s worked before. Buffy worked because it took its audience seriously while allowing itself to be silly; The Flash has some of that same spirit, meaning it can feature a pitched battle with a talking gorilla in the same episode as a heartfelt confrontation between an adoptive father and his son without feeling ridiculous.

Of course, Buffy’s real success was that it managed to strike that balance for a long time, and continued to find compelling villains for its season arcs as the years went on. The Flash’s second season begins, as Buffy’s always would, by having its heroes pick up the pieces, and it does so nicely. Here’s hoping the world’s fastest man can continue to keep up the pace.