The Brothers Sun will kick your ass and make you laugh

I don't want to go into exaggeration in the first week of the year, but I feel confident in saying that The Sun brothers has the best fight scene with guys in inflatable dinosaur costumes I've seen in 2024. Certainly, it's the only one I've seen this or any year, and I doubt there will be another one anytime soon. But that doesn't change how much it works. It's just great to start the year with a show that gives me something I've been missing from television for a while: a series that's as interested in good jokes as it is in killer brawls.

Created by Byron Wu and Brad Falchuk (co-creator of many shows in the Ryan Murphy empire, out American horror story Unpleasant cheerfulness), Netflix's new martial arts drama – there's something you can't say every day! – introduces viewers to Bruce Sun (Sam Song Li), a regular nerd living in LA. Bruce is a bit of a hustler, but loves improv comedy more than anything, so much so that he will spend his college tuition money on comedy lessons and let his best friend talk him into selling drugs – what a problem for him if he was good at it.

Bruce doesn't know this, but he's also Triad royalty. His father, Big Sun (Johnny Kou), runs one of the most respected gangs in Taipei, and someone is targeting them all. This is how Bruce is finally reunited with his long-lost older brother, Charles (Justin Chien), who comes over from Taiwan to protect Bruce and their mother, Eileen (Michelle Yeoh), after an assassination attempt on their father.

The Sun brothers opens with such a heavy set-up and brutal opening scene that it's easy to think it's more of a serious crime drama than it actually is. Sure, that's all over there, and quite satisfying. But it's all in service of family drama, as Eileen insists that Bruce continue living the normal life she brought him to LA for, even as he becomes increasingly embroiled in a simmering, over-the-top gang war in which he must regularly dump masked martial arts masters.

But what makes The Zon brothers what really sings is that the comedy isn't limited to Bruce Sun's unfortunate antics in the face of his mother and brother's hyper-competence; The show's writers and choreographers work hard to spread the laughs. Charles isn't just the tough older brother; his knowledge is undermined by the assumption that knowing the Chinese half of Chinese-American culture is enough to get by. This causes him to frequently blunder and be abused (he is tricked into delivering a giant lizard) or embarrass himself (with his low tolerance for spices).

The fighting inside The Zon brothers are also full of humor. The aforementioned dino suit fight culminates in a killer Jurassic Park face gag, and an entire fight in the Sun family home revolves around Charles repeatedly trying to kick off his opponent's shoes in his mother's house.

There's a lot to like The Sun brothers – the way it revels in cross-cultural specificity, luxuriating in lush shots of mahjong games, churros frying and improv shows in equal measure; how well it builds its genre sensation around a family story; how propulsive the eight episodes are plotted. If there are any problems, it is because of how light it all feels. In a complaint that's rare for a Netflix drama, the show continues to exist moving too fast for anyone to feel real, yet the characters are depicted with just enough basis not to fall into cartoonish caricatures. Stop and think about it, and the series fits too neatly into the liminal space between what you last saw and what you'll watch next, a very enjoyable binge that doesn't really stick.

But not the assassins in dinosaur suits. They hang well.

The Zon brothers is now streaming on Netflix.