GoldSea Streamers Guide to PARAMOUNT+
By J. J. Ghosh | 11 Jun, 2026

Part 8 of an ongoing series assessing how streaming platforms are doing by us.

I’ll be honest: I came into this review with some baggage.

Paramount has had a rough stretch.  The Skydance merger brought David Ellison into the chairman’s seat, and what followed was a purge that rattled the entire company: the ouster of longtime late night institution Stephen Colbert, whose Late Show was cancelled alongside sweeping cuts to the CBS News division.

60 Minutes — one of the most storied news programs in American television history — was not spared, with the show facing significant editorial pressure and high-profile departures.  The new Paramount is visibly trying to remake itself in a more commercially palatable, politically agreeable image, and the collateral damage has been considerable.

So yes, I arrived at this review primed for skepticism.

And then I remembered that last week I gave Amazon Prime Video an A.

Amazon — the company whose founder flew to Mar-a-Lago after the 2024 election, whose labor practices have generated years of union battles and warehouse worker complaints, whose market dominance has reshaped retail in ways that have devastated small businesses across the country.

That Amazon.  And yet Ballard, Butterfly, and The Summer I Turned Pretty all came out of its streaming platform, and the content deserved the grade it got.

The lesson the series keeps teaching me is the same one every week: separate the art from the artist.  Or in this case, separate the content from the corporation.  What Paramount+ has put on screen for AAPI viewers is a separate question from what David Ellison has done to the newsroom.  Both things can be true simultaneously.

So let’s look at what’s actually on the platform.

AAPI Hub

Paramount+ runs a dedicated AAPI Heritage Month collection called “Watch Us Rise,” which surfaces each May with a curated selection of films and series spotlighting AAPI stories.  The 2026 collection includes The Wedding Banquet, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Star Trek titles featuring George Takei and John Cho, Lilly Singh’s comedy Doin’ It, and Past Lives.

Past Lives (2023) — Celine Song’s breathtaking film about a Korean woman reconnecting with her childhood sweetheart in New York.

It’s a reasonable hub.  It’s also, as with several platforms in this series, heavier on legacy library titles than on recent originals — which means it’s celebrating a community’s presence in content the platform didn’t primarily make rather than content it did.

The Star Trek section is genuinely interesting: George Takei’s Sulu is one of the most significant AAPI characters in the history of American science fiction, and Paramount+ being the home of all things Star Trek means it has an AAPI representation legacy that predates streaming entirely.

That counts for something.  It just doesn’t count for everything.

The Content List

What’s actually worth watching:

Past Lives (2023) — Celine Song’s breathtaking film about a Korean woman reconnecting with her childhood sweetheart in New York.  One of the best films of the decade.  The fact that it’s on Paramount+ is a genuine asset.

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) — Kal Penn and John Cho’s stoner comedy remains one of the most influential AAPI films ever made — not because it’s high art, but because it was the first mainstream American comedy to center two Asian American leads as fully realized, funny, relatable human beings rather than stereotypes.  Still on the platform.  Still holds up.

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) — Kal Penn and John Cho’s stoner comedy remains one of the most influential AAPI films ever made

The Wedding Banquet (2025) — A remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 classic, now available on Paramount+.  Updated for a contemporary queer Asian American audience.

Star Trek franchise — George Takei as Sulu and John Cho as the rebooted Sulu across the Kelvin timeline films represent decades of AAPI presence in one of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history.  The entire Star Trek library lives here.

Korean original pipeline:

Paramount has been investing deliberately in Korean original content, with a string of Paramount+ streaming hits from Korea demonstrating how its international content development and streaming expansion strategy is working.  The Korean pipeline reflects genuine financial commitment to Asian storytelling at scale — with the same domestic-international caveat that applies at Netflix and Amazon.

The cancellation shelf:

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy deserves a mention here.  The show — which featured a diverse ensemble cast including significant AAPI representation — was cancelled after two seasons despite an 87% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.  Low audience scores and struggles to rank on the Nielsen streaming charts contributed to its end.  Another show with genuine representation credentials, gone before it found its footing.

The NCIS: Hawaiʻi Problem

The most significant AAPI representation story in Paramount+’s recent history is not something they made.  It’s something they let die.

NCIS: Hawaiʻi premiered on CBS in 2021 as the first NCIS series to feature a female Special Agent in Charge — Jane Tennant, played by Vanessa Lachey — and assembled one of the most diverse ensemble casts in the franchise’s history.  It broke new ground as the first NCIS series with a female lead, and introduced LGBTQ+ representation through Lucy Tara, played by Yasmine Al-Bustami.  It was set in Hawaii, shot in Hawaii, and employed hundreds of local cast and crew members.

Season 3 opened to 5.6 million average viewers.  The show stayed above 5 million viewers for most of its run.  Those are not struggling numbers.  But CBS cancelled it after three seasons, citing the steep cost of shooting on location in Hawaii and the need for “cohesiveness of the schedule.”

“This is a huge loss for representation,” cast members said in reaction to the cancellation.  They were right.  The cancellation left Hawaii without any major TV production for the first time in over two decades, impacting local employment and the island’s film industry.

The question of whether to move NCIS: Hawaiʻi to Paramount+ — as CBS had done with S.E.A.L. Team and Evil — was raised and quickly dismissed.  “Budgets are challenged, so we don’t have an unlimited amount of slots on Paramount+,” said CBS president George Cheeks.  The show that was too expensive to keep was also too expensive to save.

The Honest Assessment

Paramount+ gets a C+.

The platform has genuine AAPI assets — Past Lives is one of the best films on any platform in this series, Harold & Kumar is a landmark, the Star Trek legacy is real, and the Korean content pipeline shows financial commitment to Asian storytelling.  The Watch Us Rise hub is functional.

But the NCIS: Hawaiʻi cancellation is a significant mark against a platform that had, in that show, one of the most prominently AAPI-cast procedural dramas on American television — and chose budget cohesion over representation.  The Star Trek: Starfleet Academy cancellation compounds the pattern.  Paramount+ has a habit of greenlighting diverse content and then discovering that the budget doesn’t stretch far enough to sustain it.

The library is stronger than the originals.  The originals keep getting cancelled.  And the community that watched NCIS: Hawaiʻi for three seasons while it shot in their neighborhoods and employed their neighbors got a form letter about schedule cohesion.

The good news about a C is that there's ample room for improvement.  And maybe I’ll be proven wrong and the new Paramount+ owners will reverse course and make identity and inclusion a top priority going forward.  I’m not holding my breath.

Next up: Peacock.