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Praise for “Kim’s Convenience” poured in alongside the fifth and final season when it premiered on Netflix last week. Based on a play by Ins Choi, the sitcom centered on a Korean Canadian family running a corner store in Toronto. It was lauded for presenting a no-frills look at the Kims’ daily life, and for being “quietly revolutionary” in its lack of explanation for certain aspects of Korean culture.

But in a somewhat ironic twist, two of the show’s lead actors have since spoken out about poor representation and conduct behind the scenes. Jean Yoon, who portrayed the family matriarch, and Simu Liu, who played her son, said the writers room lacked East Asian women — specifically, Korean women — and produced scripts for Season 5 that Yoon described on Twitter as “overtly racist.”

Yoon noted that while Choi had a hand in crafting “Kim’s Convenience,” his White co-creator, Kevin White, was the showrunner and, therefore, set the tone for what the workplace became. She also referred to Choi’s “diminished presence on set” in later seasons. Although Liu didn’t call White out by name, he wrote in a lengthy Facebook post that he was often frustrated by how the “overwhelmingly white” producers overlooked the lived experience of the show’s Asian Canadian cast.

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Liu said he didn’t think Choi, the sole Korean writer, “did enough to be a champion for those voices.” (Yoon added on Twitter that a Korean woman was hired as a story editor for Season 5 but “never advanced to screen credit.”) Liu, set to appear in Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” said he began to pursue work in Los Angeles when it became clear he “could not rely on Kim’s to take my career where it needed to go.” Despite how popular the show became — enough for Netflix to distribute it internationally after its Canadian premiere — Liu wrote that the actors were paid “an absolute horsepoop rate” compared with those on fellow CBC Television sitcom “Schitt’s Creek.”

“Many of us in the cast were trained screenwriters with thoughts and ideas that only grew more seasoned with time,” he wrote. “But those doors were never opened to us in any meaningful way.”

Originally renewed for a sixth season, too, “Kim’s Convenience” was cut short by the departures of Choi and White. Producers wrote in a statement that without the co-creators, whose representatives haven’t yet responded to The Washington Post’s request for comment, they wouldn’t have been able to “deliver another season of the same heart and quality that has made the show so special.”

Liu noted that producers have planned a spinoff for the character played by Nicole Power, the only White member of the main cast, and said that while proud of his co-star, he remains “resentful of all of the circumstances that led to the one non-Asian character getting her own show.”

“Kim’s Convenience” is only the latest television series featuring prominent characters of Asian descent to face criticism for inadequate representation in the writers room.

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BBC America’s “Killing Eve” was undeniably boosted by the star power of Sandra Oh, a Korean Canadian actress with a dozen Emmy nominations to her name, but caught flak last June after a writer shared a photo of its seemingly all-White writing staff. The showrunner has changed each season, meaning the vision relies heavily on the character expertise of constants Oh and Jodie Comer, her co-star. Speaking to The Post about the third season, Oh expressed that she had been the one to suggest the show switch gears a bit to explore Eve’s Korean heritage.

In an extensive interview with Vulture in April, actor Daniel Dae Kim, who is Korean American, said he was worried about his character, Jin, getting killed off “Lost” but was able to stay on in large part thanks to Monica Macer, a Black and Korean American writer who lobbied for him (and worked with fellow writer Christina Kim on some Korean-specific elements). In conversation with The Post last summer about her career, Macer said she could speak to some of Jin’s cultural experiences but avoided feeling tokenized as a writer because of the welcoming work environment.

Such writers rooms are few and far between in the industry, which, as several Black television writers expressed to The Post, has often treated non-White people as “diversity decoration” without taking their ideas into consideration. Sometimes, that dynamic transfers to the screen.

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While praising the lighthearted humor of “Kim’s Convenience” — and acknowledging the rarity of a show that centers on immigrants in lieu of marginalizing them — Vanity Fair television critic Sonia Saraiya wrote that its “studied buoyancy” could become exhausting. Yoon and co-star Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, her on-screen husband, play characters who “have to be carefully packaged and presented to be comprehensible, not to mention relatable and likable,” Saraiya stated.

The characterization raises questions as to whether the Kims were written with a White audience in mind. Yoon suggested on Twitter that Korean viewers who appreciated elements like the show’s approach to Korean cuisine had her to thank. She stated that with the exception of Choi — who “doesn’t know how to cook” — none of the other writers were Korean and the room “had no Korean cultural resources … at all.”

“What I find tragic about this situation was the refusal to believe the urgency with which we advocated for inclusion in the writers room. The failure to send us treatments, outlines, the resistance to cultural corrections & feedback,” Yoon wrote. “There is so much I am proud of. But … the more successfully I advocated for my character, the more resistance and suspicion I earned from the Writers/Producers.”

Read more:

Asian women say Hollywood has failed them for decades. They’re ready for meaningful change.

Black TV writers have often felt like ‘diversity decoration.’ Now they’re braced for another round of promises.

‘Never Have I Ever’ gives immigrant mothers the dimension they rarely receive on TV

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