Things could be going better for Henry Li. He’s 30, still living with his parents and trying to rekindle a sci-fi writing career that’s been dead since his girlfriend and collaborator left him. His parents just want him to meet a nice girl, get married and move out.
So much so that it becomes a case for Chinese Family Tinder, a highly structured, restaurant-based matchmaking operation overseen by a matriarch who will not countenance romantic failure. Or, as it’s characterised in Homebound 3.0, “like being prodded by a table of Chinese zookeepers trying to get two pandas to mate”.
Henry doesn’t want a bar of it – which ironically brings him together with Melissa, who is also chafing at parental expectations. If they fake being boyfriend and girlfriend, the heat will go off them both. What could possibly go wrong?
Family Tinder is a real thing, confirms Sam Wang, who created and wrote Homebound 3.0 and plays the role of Henry in the series.
“But it’s probably not as systematic or as well organised as in this show – although I’m sure this version also exists in some way as well. For me, it was more like, my parents would surprise me every now and then and be like, ‘Oh, hey, remember that auntie from China? She’s visiting Sydney, we’re going to have dinner tonight.’ And so you’re like, ‘Okay, yeah, I remember her.’ And you rock up and there’s this other person there and you’re like, what the f--- is going on? But you clue onto it pretty quickly. It kind of doesn’t work after a little bit.”
Wang came up with the concept for Homebound in 2018, in a pitch for an NZ On Air web series fund (“kind of like Sex and the City, because they’re 30 and single – but instead of living it up in New York City, they’re living with their parents in West Auckland”). He missed out, but a year later, the idea won the”Big Pitch” session at the annual Screen Producers NZ (Spada) conference and signed up with comedy specialists Kevin & Co, producers of Taskmaster and New Zealand Today.
“I went in and I was just like, ‘Hey, guys, if we, if we do option this, can I maybe write it and … maybe act in it?’ Because I didn’t know, this was the first time that I had been in any of these meetings. I was like, ‘Maybe I can write it.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, of course you’re going to write it.’”
The result is a remarkably assured (and funny) debut, in which Wang plays opposite fellow New Zealander Michelle Ang (the hard-nosed Tracy Hong in Outrageous Fortune). Bala Murali Shingade also stands out as good-natured corporate nerd Aidan. Wang was able to draw on his other career – as a lawyer at a Big Four consulting firm – to write the latter part.
Yes, he left a prestige law job to become a writer and actor. His adult life, in Auckland and Sydney, has been “a zigzag” between the law and the tenuousness of the performing arts. This, surely, is the stuff of Chinese parent nightmares?
“My parents only have me, so they kind of don’t have a choice,” he laughs. “They’re really supportive. I think they got various shocks along the way, from wanting to leave law school to go to drama school. So, I think I’ve prepared them.”
Homebound 3.0, Three, Thursday, June 15, 9.00pm.
