Netflix somehow says no to Michelle Yeoh, ditches The Brothers Sun
The comedy/action/drama series starred Oscar winner Yeoh as the matriarch of a family of hardcore gangsters (and one improv student)
Aux News Michelle Yeoh
Netflix is—despite all indications that it’s just a terrible idea—apparently getting out of the Michelle Yeoh business, announcing tonight that it’s canceling single-season action-comedy-drama series The Brothers Sun. And not just any kind of cancellation: This is a Friday night kill, the TV cancellation equivalent of an early morning walk of shame, head down to avoid eye contact with a judgmental world.
Starring Yeoh, plus Justin Chien, Sam Song Li, Joon Lee, and Highdee Kuan, the series was co-created by Glee’s Brad Falchuk, working with newcomer Byron Wu. The series focused on a young med student/improv aficionado (ugh) named Bruce Sun, who discovers that his estranged family are some of the most feared and renowned gangsters in Taipei, with his family’s violent past intruding on his slacker lifestyle. Yeoh starred as the family matriarch, navigating her two sons’ very different attitudes toward life, while also expressing her own ambitions after her gangster husband is put into a coma in the show’s first episode.
Released in January of 2024, Sun was (alongside Disney+’s American Born Chinese) one of the first major projects Yeoh embarked on after reminding Hollywood (not for the first, second, or third time) how goddamn good she was with her Oscar-winning turn in Everything Everywhere All At Once. The series drew strong reviews and topped at least a few weeks of Netflix’s weekly charts, but ultimately didn’t pick up enough of an audience to make it a bona fide streaming sensation—or buy itself a second season to build on the threads set down in the first. Yeoh, at least, will stay busy in the aftermath: She stars in this year’s Wicked adaptation, has her own Star Trek spinoff still in the works, and has plugged in to James Cameron’s Avatar franchise, which’ll likely keep her in credits for at least the next decade.
25 Comments
They’re not really saying no to Michelle Yeoh, they’re saying no to more The Brothers Sun, which was.. fine. Tone was a bit all over the place, had a few good actions scenes (the one in the golf club was excellent) but too few overall, and suffered from being 45+ minute episodes when 30 minute episodes would have forced the writing and pacing to be tighter.
Yeah. About half the site’s content now is based entirely on whether we are supposed to love or hate a celebrity. If we’re supposed to love the celebrity, then Hollywood should give them absolutely everything. If we’re supposed to hate a celebrity, then it’s terrible that they are doing any work at all.Notice how long it takes for the article to give any attention at all whether The Brothers Sun was good or popular. (I has a mediocre 61 on Metacritic, and the only article the AV Club wrote about the series before now gave it a positive but not glowing B.) Instead, the core argument is that it’s a terrible mistake for Netflix to be “getting out of the Michelle Yeoh business.” But this isn’t a personal insult to Yeoh. It’s how the business works. Surely a veteran actor who appeared in Everything Everywhere All at Once and Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank in the same year can understand that not every project works.
About half the site’s content now is based entirely on whether we are supposed to love or hate a celebrity. You put into words something I’ve really come to loathe about modern internet cultural discussion, where it feels weirdly dismissive of the actual culture itself and is almost entirely based on whether the signifiers mean it Deserves success or failure. The Brothers Sun can’t just be a decent but not great series that wasn’t asked to come back for another season and will be forgotten about in a month, it has to be Netflix making a specific dig at Yeoh. The show itself is incidental to the story about it being cancelled.There’s something in there about how the modern take-based internet ecosystem combined with the content deluge of streaming services has created an environment where the actual art that discussions are supposedly about is so devalued so as to be ancillary to itself. The amount of people who actually *watch* 90% of the content that’s discussed is a fraction of the people who talk about, and eventually people just stop pretending that the content is actually meaningful to the discussion.
I think some of what’s happened is economic — the sites that cover pop culture, film, and television have collapsed, and are either gone or barely limping by. That’s certainly what’s happened at the AV Club.To write meaningful analysis of a movie or TV show, you have to watch it, and that takes time. It’s far quicker (and cheaper) to focus on the personalities producing the art, rather than the art itself, because the articles depend almost entirely on knowledge the writer already has. You don’t have to have watched anything to write, “______, who said something about intimacy coordinators we don’t like five years ago, has a new movie coming out. BOOOO!”
for a show presented as being a michelle yeoh vehicle, she was barely present or relevant to the narrative.
There were some enjoyable moments to the show, but there just wasn’t enough there for you to be emotionally invested in anything, which led to a lot of padding. For a show with ‘Brothers’ in the title, they kept the family apart far too often, as if the writers themselves didn’t really believe in the core relationship. Had they elevated the family aspect and did something to punch me in the heart, it wouldn’t have felt like a bunch of cliched ideas that don’t work all that well together. Yeoh deserves better material.
She’s been in a surprising amount of mediocre Netflix stuff in the last several years. I wonder if she’s got some kind of deal with them or is just a reliable go-to. In either case, good for her for getting what I hope is easy money (and picking stuff that’s not so bad it sticks with her) while still fitting in better material. Winning the Academy Award was a huge moment for her where she could’ve rested on her laurels for a while, but it’s probably hard to shake off her work ethic after coming up in the HK action scene and then grinding in Hollywood for a while.
I think once you get outside of the acting A-list (and, despite the Academy Award, Yeoh isn’t there) most actors think of acting as a job. After you do a movie or TV show, you do the next one. Hopefully these are great projects that you feel passionately about. But if someone wants to cast you, and pay you a fair wage for your work, and you have the availability to do it, I think the default answer for almost all actors is yes.
“She’s been in a surprising amount of mediocre Netflix stuff in the last several years.”Her “Witcher” story arc was too unbearable. I couldn’t finish her spin-off or even the original series. Some of these casting/writing decisions seem very lazy. They’re expecting a couple of big names to hold up an entire show, but then the creators buy costumes from Spirit Halloween and get plot ideas from A.I. Of course we don’t keep watching. Does she need a new agent or something?
To be fair she wasn’t exactly hard up for cash before the success of EEAAO. Shes married to Jean Todt former head of Ferrari’s Formula One Team and the former president of the FIA (International Motorsports Federation) .
Ah, so I assume that Jean’s got all that Ferrari bribe money.
That and the fact the FIA are basically just FIFA missing an F
Hey, don’t malign the Ferrari Insurance Agency like that. Like hell would FIA let an American anywhere near them, let alone the most stereotypical American you could find.
And whenever they did elevate family they made the wrong decision. Essentially the plot of the first season is, hey, what’s a little murder between family members. And of course, being family is more important than being a sex trafficking victim. I mean I’m all for immoral characters as protagonists, but when they try to play them as the moral base, no thank you.
Justin Chien really needs to be the next Hollywood leading man heartthrob after this, that man is foine
Not like you were giving it much press before
Yes. You’d think that if “all indications” were that it was a “terrible idea” to cancel The Brothers Sun, then this site would have covered the given the show at least some coverage after the initial review. It seems likely that the reason this site didn’t cover the show is largely the same reason Netflix cancelled it — no one was watching or cared about it.
Yeah… Hollywood doesn’t seem to understand that Star Trek’s Terran Universe is emblematic of a core theme of humanity, that folks have two sides to them. Yeoh has been play-acting both the non-evil and the kinda-evil sides of a character, but if they keep messing with her, they may find out how extreme the Terran Empress can really be!
American Born Chinese hit only a few months after the Oscars and the marketing confoundingly failed to capitalize on the fact they had her and Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu and James Hong.
https://twitter.com/MikeRoyce/status/1763966133651267625?s=20
it wasn’t good or popular, and probably expensive.
Not surprised. Even with Yeoh and and interesting concept, I could only handle one episode. Lots of cringy dialogue and bad acting, which is a shame.
I’m just waiting for someone to option The Art of Prophecy so she can star in it
I would guess Ms. Yeoh is perfectly fine not being tied down by that humdrum show.
Not surprised it was canceled. I enjoyed it but I can’t argue with many of the criticisms and it didn’t generate any buzz.