‘Fresh Off The Boat’ Season 4 Renewed By ABC Despite Inconsistent Ratings

The Huang family will return to ABC in “Fresh Off the Boat” Season 4.

ABC just renewed the series starring Randall Park and Constance Wu. The half-hour comedy, which is set in the mid-‘90s, follows the life of a 12-year-old boy named Eddie (Hudson Yang) and his Taiwanese family after they move to and start a new life in Orlando, Florida. The series is based on the memoir of the same title written by Eddie Huang. “Fresh Off the Boat” is created and executive produced by Nahnatchka Khan. Jake Kasdan and Melvin Mar also serve as executive producers of the show, according to Variety.

Read: “The Catch” canceled by ABC after two seasons

The renewal of the show for a fourth season came as a surprise because its ratings haven’t been consistent week after week. When Season 3 premiered in October of last year, episode 1 only garnered a total of five million viewers and a 1.57 rating among audiences aged 18 to 49, according to TV Series Finale. The ratings for the next three episodes continued to drop as well. Episode 5 saw an obvious improvement in ratings and viewership because the installment resulted in 22.43 percent demo change. But unfortunately, the ratings for the final episodes of “Fresh Off the Boat” didn’t impress.

Meanwhile, even though ratings are a huge factor when it comes to a show’s renewal or cancellation, it still cannot be denied that “Fresh Off the Boat” has been a huge success. In fact, lead star Park didn’t even anticipate that the series will be a hit on primetime television. The actor partly credits the show’s success to the fact that “Fresh Off the Boat” is “comedy without the cliché.”

During an interview with NPR, Park said, “There were so few examples of Asian or Asian-American lead characters on American TV or even in the movies. And the ones that have existed for so long were either stereotypical or offensive in some way, or just not reflective of the lives of people in the community.”

Park also said that it has become his and his co-star’s goal to make the show funny without reducing their respective characters to racist caricatures. “Ultimately just having the goal of making sure that first and foremost the show is funny – and really, I mean, not going there in terms of the stereotypical jokes, the easy jokes, the racist jokes. That was easy for us to avoid because to us that’s not funny. We weren’t going there – and do those tired, cliché, stereotypical jokes,” he explained.

As of late, it is still unclear how many episodes “Fresh Off the Boat” Season 4 will have. In Season 3, the hit ABC series had a total of 23 episodes. In Season 2, a total of 24 episodes were released by the network, but in Season 1, ABC only aired 13 installments. The premiere date for “Fresh Off the Boat” Season 4 hasn’t been announced yet either. Season 1 premiered on Feb. 4, 2015, while Seasons 2 and 3 premiered on Sept. 22, 2015 and Oct. 11, 2016, respectively.