Simu Liu’s ‘Hello (Again)’ leads a new crop of web series featuring Black and Asian characters and stories

After Simu Liu first appeared on the TV comedy hit “Kim’s Convenience” and before he became a globally famous Marvel superhero, he hatched an idea for a romantic comedy with an Asian hero and heroine.

That idea became the web series “Hello (Again),” which makes its debut on the CBC Gem streaming service on Friday.

Liu’s name has sparked heightened interest in the show — about a Toronto restaurant cook who begins, ends, then begins a relationship over and over again thanks to the intervention of a supernatural child — but it’s just one example of a format that’s providing opportunities to creators of colour that are few and far between on regular broadcast TV.

On March 31, for instance, CBC Gem will debut “Revenge of the Black Best Friend,” created by Black writer and broadcaster Amanda Parris, and starring Olunike Adeliyi of “The Porter.”

That same day sees the premiere of “Topline,” a web drama created by Filipino Canadian writer-director Romeo Candido, about a Filipina teenager who dreams of a career in the music business.

Another Filipino Canadian, Edmonton comedian Gordie Lucius, debuts “Frick, I Love Nature” on Friday, in which he explores the natural world and the creatures in it with the help of cheesy props and deadpan humour.

“You know, we’re lucky enough in Canada to have funders (and) a broadcaster like the CBC that has created space for short-form, scripted fare,” said Parris in a video interview. “You don’t have to have as long a track record of evidence that you can get something done as you would if you were pitching a television show.”

Web series are lower risk for broadcasters, agreed Nathalie Younglai in a separate video interview. A writer on CBC’s “Coroner,” she was brought in to work with Liu on “Hello (Again)” after he pitched the idea to the CBC in 2017. (She was also Liu’s screenwriting mentor in the Reel Asian Film Festival’s summer youth workshop in 2013.)

With episodes that average 10 to 15 minutes, the budgets are smaller than conventional 30-minute or hour-long shows. And because web series stream on the internet, they don’t have to fit into a schedule or be sold to TV advertisers.

“Non-traditional series give more room for experimentation and more auteur-driven voices,” said Candido by email. “TV is such an expensive medium, so shows like ‘Topline’ can take more risks regarding subject matter, and tone and style.”

In his series, 16-year-old Tala (Cyrena Fiel) secretly records songs in her Scarborough bathroom as her alter ego, Illisha, but her widowed father, who’s living on disability benefits, expects her to go to nursing school. When one of her songs goes viral she’s invited to “topline” — provide melodies and lyrics — for a hot Toronto music studio but has to keep it secret from her dad.

“Hello (Again)” has elements of a conventional rom-com — well, not the pesky child whom nobody but lead Jayden (Alex Mallari Jr.) can see or hear — but it’s grounded in the experience of being part of an Asian immigrant family in Toronto.

Initially, Jayden’s family was meant to be Chinese Canadian, like Liu’s own, but Scarborough-raised Mallari Jr. (“Dark Matter,” “Workin’ Moms,” “Ginny & Georgia”) was born in the Philippines, so in the series he was given a Filipina mother and Chinese father. Rong Fu, who plays Jayden’s love interest, medical resident Avery, is Chinese Canadian.

Naturally, the casts in web series like “Hello (Again)” “Topline” and “Revenge of the Black Best Friend” are dominated by actors of colour.

Younglai said it was “kind of overwhelming” how much talent was available, especially when casting the part of little girl Willa (Rebecca Chan) in “Hello (Again).” “It was hard to see all this amazing potential and then you can only choose one,” she said.

“In Canada, we have a shameful reservoir of, like, huge amounts of talent that are just starving for the opportunity to really showcase what it is that they can do,” said Parris.

Take Adeliyi, for instance, a Toronto-born actor of Nigerian and Jamaican heritage with a two-decade TV career. She has had roles in shows like “Coroner,” “The Expanse” and “Workin’ Moms” but really started getting noticed this year for “The Porter,” a CBC drama that tells a Black Canadian story with a majority Black cast.

“Revenge of the Black Best Friend” not only casts Black actors but lampoons the reasons they’re not as well known as their white counterparts, with Adeliyi playing Dr. Toni Shakur, a self-help guru for token Black characters.

Parris came up with the idea after reflecting on how underwritten the Black characters were in the shows and movies she enjoyed in the 1990s. In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” for instance, she recalled Black slayer Kendra as having a much bigger role than she had.

“I was so excited to see a young Black girl on ‘Buffy.’ And I didn’t realize she got killed off so quickly and that her accent was so terrible,” Parris said.

A character named Kendra (Tymika Tafari) gets to slay again — and to drop the bad Jamaican accent — in an episode of “Revenge of the Black Best Friend” that also features characters who look like Black Ghostbuster Winston (Daren A. Herbert), Dean Thomas (Dante Jemmott) from “Harry Potter” and Rochelle (Victoria Taylor) from “The Craft.”

Parris hopes web shows like “Revenge” give creators who are Black, Indigenous or people of colour more leverage when it comes to pitching traditional TV fare.

This year has seen the debut of several mainstream Canadian shows that feature lead characters of colour, including “The Porter,” Andrew Phung’s “Run the Burbs” for CBC and CTV’s “Children Ruin Everything.”

And Parris is encouraged by the fact that even a majority white show like the CBC comedy “Son of a Critch” has an Asian character: Filipino best friend Ritchie (Mark Ezekiel Rivera), “who is a fully formed character, and has a family and has … a point of view, and you completely fall in love with him.”

But both she and Younglai say the change needs to come faster.

“It’s great that there are all these new shows coming out, but can we have two Asian shows? I don’t know,” said Younglai.

In the meantime, Parris said she’s honoured to be debuting “Revenge” as part of “this wave of really exciting (web) content that’s coming out. I just really hope that folks watch it.”

Debra Yeo is a deputy editor and a contributor to the Star’s Entertainment section. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @realityeo