The CBS series The Equalizer became a hit last year by keeping its focus on entertaining an audience. This year, it’s determined to abandon that successful strategy in order to hector its viewers with left-wing ideology instead.
In this week’s episode, ‘Chinatown,’ on Sunday, the show tackled the issue of anti-Asian attacks in New York City. It portrayed the culprits as ignorant, working-class white guys who get away with crimes because of a racist and indifferent police system. The episode avoided an elephant in the room — the majority of anti-Asian attacks in major U.S. cities are black-on-Asian According to U.S. Justice Department statistics, crimes
However, the episode was not conducive to uncomfortable conversations. The show instead relied on a clichéd woke narrative about a group of working-class white males stalking Asians in New York City’s Chinatown.
After a sweet old lady named Ms. Li is killed in an “accidental” fire at her Chinatown bakery, Robyn McCall (Queen Latifah) is hired by a Chinatown resident to track down the real culprits. McCall teams up with Ray Lai, a Cantonese-speaking former cop (Perry Yung) to help locate the murderers. Lai left the police force, he says, because he got tired of seeing of “cases like this” being “t-boned by a racist system.”
Lai further attacks the New York Police Department (NYPD) in a conversation with McCall’s cop friend, Detective Dante (Tory Kittles). Dante is currently in prison for his father who was a disgraced ex-police officer.
LaiYour father was Big Ben. I knew Ben. He was a great man. One of the only cops that tried to help me when I was hitting brick walls on hate crime cases. What?
Dante: You don’t often hear many positive things about your dad.
LaiYou were good then, but it was tough to stay that way. These walls weren’t easy to breach without crashing. Keep your family safe and happy. Not a lot of fine print when it came to people who looked like us.
Dante: Certain things are the same..
In an interview with AsAm News Yung said, “This episode of The EqualizerBy showing solidarity between peoples of color, dares tackle institutionalized White Supremacy systemically and institutionally through the anti–Asian violence storyline.
Dante and Lai are bonded by a common sense of being oppressed and “the system”. It is designed to establish a stark “us-versus-them” division between whites, and nonwhites. This is just another example of Critical Race Theory (CRT), leaking into Hollywood scripts.
The white men who killed Ms. Li work at an electric supply store near Chinatown. When McCall discusses the racist men’s social media posts with her Asian colleague Mel (Liza Lapira), McCall makes a veiled reference to Donald Trump:
MelThey’re like conspiracy theory influencers. Scapegoating Chinese Americans for everything from disease to the economy.
McCall: Fled by our own leaders.
In 2020, Democrats falsely accused then-President Trump of scapegoating Asians because he criticized communist China’s role in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Chinatown is just one example of many. EqualizerEpisodes this season have promoted predictable left-wing stories. Earlier this season, the series vilified ICE and Trump-era immigration policies and attacked cops and “whiteness.”
It is an extreme departure to push left-wing scripts. The Equalizer inaugural season that mostly avoided in-your-face politics, One notable exception was an episode in which the Tea Party was attacked. Otherwise, the series stuck with enjoyable storylines that made it a rare hit in a declining network television landscape.
But the season two writers have decided to ditch entertaining for lecturing. It remains to be seen whether the series will sustain its ratings long-term with such a change.
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