Kim's Convenience

A Korean Canadian family runs a corner store in Toronto's Moss Park neighborhood. Appa (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) and Umma (Jean Yoon) work the register and fight about everything from church politics to their daughter's love life. Janet (Andrea Bang) is the art-school kid who still lives upstairs. Jung (Simu Liu, years before Shang-Chi) is the estranged son working at a car rental across town with his best friend Kimchee (Andrew Phung). It's a half-hour CBC sitcom adapted by Ins Choi from his 2011 stage play, and the pilot lays out the whole board: the store, the rift with Jung, the small mercies of family that won't quite talk to each other.

Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. That's the argument. His Appa is a full comic invention, cranky and tender in the same breath, and he can land a punchline with a single vowel sound. Jean Yoon plays Umma with a quieter register that keeps the show from tipping into caricature. Andrew Phung is the secret weapon; Kimchee is written as the loud best friend and Phung makes him weirdly lovable. Ins Choi and Kevin White (a Corner Gas alum) write in short, warm scenes that trust the ensemble. The Toronto texture is real. Nobody's shooting Vancouver for New York here.

It's a broad network sitcom. Episodes reset. Nothing accumulates the way a prestige show accumulates. If you've aged out of the multi-cam rhythm, the setups can feel telegraphed and the B-plots at the car dealership sag. The Shannon–Jung workplace stuff is the weakest lane by a mile. And there's the offscreen story that broke after the show ended, when Simu Liu and Jean Yoon went public about the writers' room and storylines they'd fought. It doesn't unmake the episodes, but if you go in cold and then read the aftermath, some jokes land differently on a rewatch.

If you like Schitt's Creek, Corner Gas, Detectorists, or the gentler stretches of Ted Lasso, you're in. This is comfort-food television with actual specificity underneath the comfort. If you need serialized stakes, morally slippery leads, or a show that swings for the fences every week, you'll bail somewhere in episode two when Appa is haggling over a coupon and the plot doesn't get bigger than that.

WORTH IT is where this lands because the ceiling is a great lead performance inside a modest, honest show. Ins Choi wrote from a specific Toronto Korean Canadian life, not from a pitch deck, and it shows in the small stuff: church cliques, generational cold wars, the way Appa says "OK, see you." The show has a point of view about immigrant families and it dramatizes that point of view through Appa and Umma bickering, not through anyone giving a speech. It passes the lecture test cleanly. Where it falls short of higher tiers is ambition. The writing plays it safe, the plots are sitcom-shaped, and the network format keeps the ceiling low. Watch Paul Sun-Hyung Lee do his thing. That's the case.