There is something weirdly ironic about the fact that the lone 1974-1975 primetime television series starring an Asian lead actor was met with some controversy before it even premiered because of complaints from some Asian-American groups that series lead Khigh Dhiegh was just "passing" as Asian.
In a December 1974 interview with Marilyn Beck, Dhiegh shrugged off complaints from critics, telling her "those claims are wrong - and they are right." He explained that his mother was of Egyptian, Spanish and Chinese lineage and his father was Italian, Portuguese and Zulo Indian.
Along with the criticism following his casting on Khan!, he had also recently faced criticism over being cast in the lead role in a recent ABC made-for-television movie entitled Judge Dee In The Monastery, which was promoted by the network as having an "all-Oriental cast."
He told Beck that his critics "are liberal revolutionaries with social acne - and their premise is both unfair and unconstitutional. If their complaints are valid, that would mean no Chinese could ever portray a Japanese, no white an Indian, no Jew an Italian. Their premise is totally emotionally and irrational. As far as what I am: I am a man, a human being attempting to see the beauty in all human beings."
However, no matter his ethnic lineage, those television viewers that did recognize him at the time probably did so from his recent stint as the crime boss and former agent for the Chinese Ministry of Interior "Wo Fat" on Hawaii 5-0. But it turned out that the uproar over whether or not he was Asian enough was the least of the problems for Khan!
The first problem was that Dhiegh apparently wasn't especially interested in doing press for the series and when you look back at the coverage of the show, there is almost nothing I could find in the contemporary press. There were a couple of stories that included quotes from Dhiegh, but those seemed to primarily come from a press packet of quotes provided to TV critics by CBS.
And for whatever reason, Dhiegh also insisted that his name not be included in the show's credits or advertising, arguing the show was a collaborative effort and that no one should be singled out for attention.
But the biggest problem Khan! had was that it wasn't very good. I was finally able to track down a copy of the premiere episode, even though it was so pixilated it looked as it had been recorded from space. But the episode illustrated why the series didn't find an audience.
The plot of the pilot episode centered around a star quarterback who couldn't remember if he had murdered his girlfriend. The episode featured several relatively well-known real life quarterbacks - Joe Kapp and Roman Gabriel - and a solid ensemble of other guest stars. Khan's investigation was aided by his son Kim (Evan C. Kim) and daughter Anna (Irene Yah-Ling Sun), whose characters were as well-rounded as could be expected from the times.
CBS apparently didn't have much faith in the pilot episode, because it was pulled from the schedule the morning the show was set to premiere and replaced with another episode that focused on the death of several Chinese textile workers in a factory fire.
To its credit, Khan! didn't take the easy route of trafficking in a bunch of racist-adjacent tropes that audiences might have previously seen in an episode of Charlie Chan. Although that didn't stop a number of TV critics from including cringy Charlie Chan references in their review or referring to the series as "chop phooey."
But Khan! also didn't have a sense of place. Although it was supposedly set in San Francisco's Chinatown, that was barely shown. And the script itself felt like something that had been rejected by The Streets Of San Francisco.
Any TV show that premiered in the spring back then was going to struggle to find an audience in the best of circumstances. But Khan! was pulled after two episodes had aired following some fairly terrible ratings.
The show's second episode was the 59th highest-rated series of the week according to numbers from A.C. Nielsen. The only show that ranked worse that week was ABC's Kung Fu at #60. Which led a spokesperson at CBS to tell UPI that "I guess it wasn't a good week for Orientals."
