After Crazy Rich Asians triumphed at the box office, some entertainment insiders predicted a Crazy Rich Asians effect would ripple through Hollywood. Didn’t the film’s $238 million in global receipts prove there was a massive audience eager to be entertained by Asian-American talent, after all? Netflix’s surprise smash To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before—a rom-com featuring a Korean-American teen heroine—dropped the same week as Crazy Rich Asians, confirming there was gold to be mined from more inclusive storytelling.

A rush of broadcast-network development announcements last summer and fall suggested that the post–Crazy Rich Asians party was in full, jubilant swing. There was Exhibit A, a legal series produced by Hawaii Five-0’s Daniel Dae Kim, to be written by Warren Hsu Leonard; Ohana, a family epic written by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen that would be told from the perspective of Pacific Islanders; Kung Fu, a Chinese-American-focused drama by Albert Kim; and a comedy from Rick and Morty writer Jessica Gao, whimsically nicknamed Lazy Rich Asians.

None of the dramas ultimately made it through the gauntlet of network development season. As Albert Kim tweeted, “One of the hurdles we have to clear is that TV execs like to say they’re eager for shows featuring stories from a different culture. But often what they really want are stories they’re already comfortable with. They simply want to cast them with diverse actors.”

Pinpointing why individual shows don’t get green-lighted is nearly impossible, since decisions take into account so many factors: trends, budgets, demographic targets, available talent, and how well a pilot meshes with the network’s existing lineup. But somewhere in those considerations are personal taste and blind spots. Sometimes it can feel like gaslighting, to be told that TV is a merit-based system when so few series by people of color are making it to the screen.

“It’s difficult for some decision-makers to pick up shows that don’t have something in them that directly represents their experience,” said Sue Naegle, Annapurna’s chief content officer, who is working with Barry producer Jason Kim and Russian Doll co-star Greta Lee to develop KTown, a dark comedy set in L.A.’s Koreatown. If picked up, it would be HBO’s first scripted series centered on and created by Asian Americans. “Traditionally, networks have mostly been run by middle-aged, white, straight men, so it’s part of the conversation around why television has had a hard time being as diverse as our country, our world,” Naegle continued. “An inordinate amount of money has been spent on pilots and shows about good-looking, bumbling 20, 30, and 40-year-old guys who are just trying to find themselves.”

Naegle said that KTown got multiple offers not because of Crazy Rich Asians, but because “it was just a really great pitch. But I don’t know if Jason Kim and Greta Lee would have had a chance to create a show about Korean families four years ago. In the past, I would have heard, ‘Who can we find to be in it? There’s not a big star who is Korean that we could put at the center of it.’ This is just what we’re all up against all the time.”

Cullen, a former journalist, was disappointed that ABC did not pick up Ohana. Yet, she said, “Even in my short time in this business, I already see rather dramatic changes in . . . what kinds of stories networks seem willing—and even eager—to tell.” In one of her first Hollywood meetings, she was told, “I should never pitch a show with an Asian lead . . . It wasn’t ever going to happen.” All of her recent development calls, she said, have focused on stories about people of color.

Similarly, Leonard (who has written for How to Get Away with Murder and Marvel’s Runaways) said he wouldn’t have dared pitch a show like Exhibit A—set in L.A.’s Koreatown, with two Asian-American leads—before Crazy Rich Asians. Although his series didn’t get picked up, he was encouraged by the positive feedback about the characters’ cultural specificity.

“Where I grew up in rural Maine, no one in my community or on my TV screen looked like me—certainly were never the leads,” Leonard said. “So my goal has always been to create a show that some Chinese-American kid in rural Maine can turn on and see themselves reflected in—not as the villain or the sidekick, but as the hero of the story.” His next goal is to create a superhero show with a Chinese-American lead, and Leonard is emboldened by the realization that there are a growing number of Asian-American executives at studios and networks, as well as a whole posse of creators out there. “We’ve kind of created a little community, virtual and otherwise,” he said, “so we can rally behind these diverse projects together.”

While Asian-driven dramas faltered this development season, a handful of comedy series beyond KTown are still in contention. Jessica Gao’s series about a Chinese-American family got a pilot order this month at ABC, the home of Fresh Off the Boat. So did New Girl co-star Hannah Simone’s Indian-American father-daughter comedy.

Meanwhile, the writer who kick-started this mini-boom—Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan himself—is working on The Emperor of Malibu, a Chinese billionaire-meets-American-ingénue scenario. And Awkwafina, Crazy Rich Asians’ M.V.P., is creating and starring in a forthcoming Comedy Central series. “[T]his will take place where I was born and raised, off of Queens Blvd. featuring my father and my grandma, in a single family house, with many expired Asian Calendars,” Awkwafina recently wrote on Twitter. “This is a show about being raised by my grandma and dad in Queens, living at home and finding purpose. No show tunes, all female writers room, an ode to Queens and the cultural BUFFET of people that helped shape me into the human I am.”

Over at Apple, Big Sick screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon are working with Forever and Master of None co-creator Alan Yang on Little America, an anthology series that Yang once described as “like Black Mirror, but instead of being super-dark sci-fi stories, it is immigrant stories.” At the 2016 Emmys, accepting the prize for outstanding writing for a comedy series for Master of None, Yang said, “There are 17 million Asian Americans in this country, and there are 17 million Italian Americans. They have The Godfather, Goodfellas, Rocky, The Sopranos . . . we got [Sixteen Candles character] Long Duk Dong. So we’ve got a long way to go.”

Comedy sometimes serves as a Trojan horse in American pop culture, allowing marginalized populations and challenging ideas to slip through. “Mindy Kaling being a successful lead of a show was really a breakthrough,” Naegle pointed out. “People forget that getting Will & Grace on the air was a miracle. It seems so smart in retrospect, but I remember someone saying to me that they will never put a show on NBC with two men kissing. You have to push against these barriers all the time,” expanding our ideas of what classifies as niche versus mainstream.

Cullen believes that the odds of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders getting a show on the air will improve as more writers are out there pitching. “Audiences aren’t given enough credit,” she said. “I think Americans will watch those stories, and they will relate to the heart of the story, even if they don’t see themselves on-screen . . . When we’re able to tell that story to a broad American audience, I think that real social change can happen.”

This post has been updated.

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