It was okay, but very much in the CW formula, with a season-arc quest and romantic triangles and a cute hacker girl and everything. I'm not sure how it even constitutes a remake of Kung Fu. The only point of commonality is that the main character was trained in a Shaolin temple (which is actually a very familiar Vancouver location, though they did a great job with the digital Chinese mountainscape around it) and had their mentor killed. Although in the original, Caine had already killed his mentor's killer and had a price on his head as a result, making him a wandering fugitive of the sort so beloved by 1960s-70s TV series. That was the preferred formula then, but the preferred formula now is to keep a character in one place and surround them with an ensemble and an ongoing quest. And it looks like instead of having flashbacks as in the original, they're giving Nicky symbolic (or genuinely supernatural?) visitations by the ghost of her sifu.
I was excited by the idea of a series set in Chinese-American culture written by an Asian-American showrunner, but so far the roles seem more stereotypical than I expected -- the marriage-obsessed mother, the restaurant-owning father, the overachieving children with skills in math and medicine and computers and martial arts, the tong leader running Chinatown. Hopefully we'll get more nuance as the show goes on.
I did not expect a supernatural element. I don't recall anything like that in the original show. It's no surprise that a Kung Fu show made for modern audiences would emulate the style of big-action Hong Kong movies of the sort we've become more familiar with since the original, but those don't always have fantasy aspects.
