Watch Warrior on Max or Christmas is canceled

Warrior is a martial arts drama that began life on Cinemax before hopping over to Max, where it just began streaming its third season. Cinemax wasn’t exactly known for trend-setting, and the show went mostly under the radar for its first two seasons; it was actually the final series Cinemax made before the network gave up on original programming. This is a shame, because Warrior is absolutely fantastic and deserves to be included alongside recent hits The Last of Us and House of the Dragon when people talk about the best shows on the air today.

Based on an idea from Bruce Lee (the show is produced by his daughter Shannon Lee), Warrior is about a Chinese immigrant named Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) who arrives in San Francisco in the years after the Civil War, a period when many Chinese people were coming to the United States in search of work. Ah Sahm is there to search for his sister Mai Ling (Dianne Doan), who crossed “the salt” some time ago.

It doesn’t go according to plan. To make a long story short, Ah Sahm gets involved with organized crime in Chinatown, getting more responsibility and notoriety as the show goes on. The series introduces us to a wide cast of memorable characters, digs into the real-life history behind the Tong Wars of the 1870s, and kicks so much ass I may never be able to sit down again.

In short, this show is unbelievably awesome, but not nearly enough people are watching it. So I’m going to do what little I can to convince you. Here’s why you should watch Warrior on Max:

The action scenes on Warrior will knock you off your feet

Warrior has a lot going for it. The writing is tight, the acting is superb, and it really does try to explore thorny questions about race, politics, power and history.

But let’s leave all that high-brow fare for later. The martial arts scenes in Warrior are knock-down-drag-out outstanding. In the opening scene of the season 3 premiere, Ah Sahm gets thrown through a window, chops through a guy’s fingers, does a spin-kick from across the room, and about a dozen other things that literally had me yelling “OHHHH!” and “C’MON!” at my screen.

The action on this series hits hard, plain and simple. That’s in part because they keep so much of the effects practical. No shade to the SFX-driven action sequences of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there’s something refreshing and satisfying about watching a scene where you know an actor actually just got tossed through a window. You imagine the glass on the ground and you wince.

Warrior has all kinds of action scenes, from great one-on-one bouts to gang-on-gang battles that fill up the street. But of course, none of this would matter if we didn’t care about the characters. Luckily…

The cast of Warrior is terrific

Is it realistic that half the characters on Warrior seem to know advanced martial artists? I don’t know, but it sure is entertaining. But even without the action scenes, Warrior would still be more than worth watching, because the characters have been crafted with care and acted with skill.

Ah Sahm is our lead, but the show quickly establishes that he’s not the only one worth paying attention to. Despite his hopes, Mai Ling is not the innocent girl he knew in China; she’s been through a lot of hardships, and she has hardened. Their relationship is tense but also holds the possibility of reconciliation, if only the show is allowed to go on long enough for it to happen.

Jason Tobin plays Young Joon, the hard-headed heir apparent to the Hop Wei crime family who takes Ah Sahm under his wing; he quickly becomes a fan favorite. Ah Toy (Olivia Cheng) is the civic-minded madam of the local brothel while Wang Chao (Hoon Lee) is a black market salesman who recalls Littlefinger from Game of Thrones: he’s everybody’s friend for the right price, although he has more of a conscience than Petyr Baelish.

We also go outside Chinatown and meet the compromised Irish police officer Kieran Bew (Bill O’Hara), bare-knuckle union organizer Dylan Leary (Dean Jagger) and first lady of San Francisco Penelope Blake (Joanna Vanderham). Warrior is an ensemble show, and the political machinations and character drama are just as compelling as the fights. In fact, the fights only work as well as they do because the rest of the show is there to support them.

Warrior is a challenging show that’s as complex as it is fun

What emerges is a tapestry of life in San Francisco in the 1870s that recalls the sprawl of something like Game of Thrones. A closer comparison may be HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, which was also set in a specific place and time in American history. But if Steve Buscemi could do a roundhouse kick.

Warrior feels more alive than that show in part because it’s shining a light on something I don’t think as many people are familiar with. And it doesn’t shy away from the ugly prejudices that ran so rampant through the country at the time and which still echo loudly today. There is a thrill in coming to know and love this group of underdogs, a group of foreigners trying to find their way in a new land full of people who are often very hostile to them in ways big and small.

At the same time, Warrior doesn’t feel peachy. The lead characters are mostly mobsters, after all, and have plenty of flaws, and the people outside Chinatown are painted with just as much nuance. It’s a thrilling conversation of a show.

I also have to mention some of the cool things Warrior does with language. It’s kind of a miracle that the producers found so many actors who can A) act their faces off; B) fight like the wind, and; C) speak multiple languages. Warrior is mainly about the people of Chinatown, but it’s made for a U.S. audience, so most of the time the Chinese characters are speaking English, even though some of the characters don’t know how. But the show lets us know that they’re actually speaking in Chinese to each other by having them speak a few lines of dialogue with subtitles; then the camera does an ostentatious sweep, and suddenly we’re hearing non-accented English.

It’s a nice touch that might make Warrior more palatable to English-speaking audiences who may be afraid of subtitles, although you could argue that the show is trading off authenticity for relatability. Also, when the Chinese characters are talking to English speakers from outside Chinatown, some of them speak with broken English, or speak English with a Chinese accent. It’s all very inventive and impressive.

Look, just watch Warrior

I’ve tried to be analytical about why Warrior is so good, but you won’t know until you watch it yourself. My favorite episode is probably “The Blood and the Shit” from season 1, when Ah Sahm and Young Joon are charged with transporting a coffin from Nevada to San Francisco. They have to stay for a minute in a dusty desert inn taken right out of a Sergio Leone film, and the whole thing becomes a standalone western where the strangers who have no reason to trust each other must work together to overcome a dangerous obstacle. It’s great.

Warrior is full of moments like that. And for a show that’s never had a lot of buzz, it sure does look gob-stoppingly gorgeous.

So try the first episode. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. This show has heart, craft, and a bright future, if only enough people give it the love it deserves.

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