Fox’s ‘The Cleaning Lady’ Is Creating a New Kind of TV Antihero
Television writer and producer Miranda Kwok wanted to see a different take on the classic antihero than the type of character we’ve become used to—which is to say one that is historically played by a white man. So she created The Cleaning Lady, the juicy Fox drama about an undocumented Filipino-Cambodian doctor-turned-service-worker who finds herself navigating the dark underbelly of Las Vegas after working for a crime syndicate to save her ailing son.
“We’ve seen crime dramas with other characters over and over again, but we’ve never seen these stories from the lens of these undocumented immigrants and Southeast Asian characters,” Kwok, who serves as a co-showrunner with Melissa Carter, tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “We want to show characters that are fully fleshed out and multi-dimensional, and that we all have hopes, dreams, issues and challenges that we face—and the choices we’re forced to make when we’re put into these extreme circumstances.”
Much like its persistent protagonist, The Cleaning Lady—one of the few network shows to feature an Asian lead—feels like an underdog hit. The 10-episode first season averaged 3.1 million viewers per week, ranking as one of the biggest new broadcast dramas of the 2021-22 season; the pilot marked Fox’s highest-rated drama premiere in two years and, combined with multi-platform viewing, reached over 11 million viewers.