Episode 2 of the TV-esque Sex in Seattle: Other Women opens with a fast-paced recap of the highlights we might have missed or forgotten from the previous episode. These brief lights-up, lights-down scenelets remind us of the infidelities discovered, phone calls cut off, and other romantic cliffhangers that Episode 1 left unresolved. In Episode 2, Jenna (Serin Ngai) learns that her boyfriend's old flame, the foxy Anna (Marinel deJesus), is trying to steal hunky Colin (Marc delaCruz) back. Elizabeth (Kathy Hsieh) discovers that she hasn't lost her virginity to George (usually played by TJ Langley, but the night I saw it brilliantly subbed by Walter Baker), but is still in love with her high school sweetheart, Kenneth (Steven Ono), who has recently married Shari (Colleen Parker). Tess (Chloe Ahn), who is married to the gay Zane (Daniel Arreola), worries that he is sleeping with another woman.

These women and their men end up at Bush Gardens, where they drink, sing horrible karaoke, and figure out that their various love lives will remain confusing enough to warrant an Episode 3. Hsieh, Ngai, and Parker--who created the story, while Ngai wrote the script--do a good job of translating the ludicrous romantic and melodramatic conventions of soap operas to a comic, contemporary, Asian American Seattle. The characters are, like their daytime TV counterparts, more caricature than believable. Fortunately, the characters in Sex in Seattle are supposed to be--mostly--funny. In her program notes, Hsieh says that the idea for this series came about because there was no regular show about the lives of Asian Americans. While this show does blow apart the tired old stereotypes that Asians are either not sexy or only "exotic" objects of desire, its excessive silliness doesn't replace those old generalizations with anything substantial. There's a couple of extremely goofy, Keystone Kops-y scenes with people bumping significantly into each other in (and on the way to and from) the restroom, and four excruciating "fantasy" videos that accompany the ultra-bad karaoke singing. Great theater it ain't; good fun it is.