Warrior’s unlikely journey to revival began with a postscript.

In February, Banshee and Warrior executive producer Jonathan Tropper sent a note to Casey Bloys, chief content officer for HBO and HBO Max. The cult gem Banshee—which, like Warrior, was one of the lively originals Cinemax churned out before it stopped making shows—had finally been added to HBO Max that month. In his note, Tropper told me, he expressed his gratitude for Bloys’s efforts to “save the show from obscurity.”

“And then I just put a little postscript at the bottom,” Tropper continued. “It said, ‘P.S., if you want more Warrior, we could make that happen.’ And he wrote back to me two days later and said, ‘I didn’t even think that was a possibility.’”

It was. Two months after that email exchange, Warrior rose from the dead. On Wednesday the hard-charging period piece, which is one of the few American dramas to ever put a large array of Asian characters at the center of the narrative, was renewed for a 10-episode third season by HBO Max.

Warrior originated with a treatment written by Bruce Lee half a century ago—but unlike much of the project’s long, challenging journey, its recent revival was straightforward. Last year fans of Warrior were puzzled when it wasn’t available at HBO Max’s launch. Behind the scenes, Tropper said that the churn wrought by the WarnerMedia merger and the creation of HBO Max meant that pre-2021 efforts to get the show a third season floundered.

During that time, Tropper said, fellow executive producers Shannon Lee and Justin Lin—not to mention the show’s cast—were more able to keep hope alive than he was. “I’m the one who wasn’t getting my calls returned for a year and a half, two years,” said Tropper. “There was a long period where we just couldn’t get any traction.”

Some members of the cast, despite their deep love for the project, were also wrestling with whether to hang on to optimism about Warrior. “I think most of us had lost hope and had begun to move on,” said Andrew Koji, who plays Ah Sahm, a skilled fighter who becomes a folk hero to his community. “It’s just rare that something like this happens in this business.”

Truer words were never spoken. But the near-impossible happened in large part because early this year, both seasons of Warrior finally arrived on HBO Max. It wasn’t long before the cast and creative team were fielding enthusiastic responses to their saga of battling gangs and clever operators inside and outside 1870s San Francisco Chinatown.

“I had colleagues in the industry reaching out, saying to me, ‘Do you need money to fund this?’” said Lee. “There was a lot of ardent passion for wanting the show to move forward. Not just from individuals within the industry, but also fans who had petitions going.”

A couple of things decisively swung the odds in the show’s favor. One of them was that, according to a source at HBO Max, since Warrior’s arrival there, it has been one of the service’s top 15 most viewed series.

Another key factor, according to producers Tropper, Lee, and Lin, was the support of Bloys, who was promoted to chief content officer of HBO and HBO Max toward the end of last summer. After that February email, the executive asked for more information about how a revival would work, Tropper said, and after a short string of meetings, the third season was greenlit.  

“The show has performed well, but part of the equation is qualitative as well. Warrior tells a story no one else is telling in a way no one else is doing,” said Bloys, adding that the revival is “fairly miraculous”: “The cast and creative team were all willing to rearrange their schedules to make this happen somehow.”

Nothing is set in stone yet, but Tropper said there’s a good chance Warrior will go into production next year at its previous studio in Cape Town, South Africa. There may be a time jump beyond the shattering events of the show’s second season, but Tropper said the goal is to “bring back everybody we didn’t kill” and have the new season set in the tense time frame before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Warrior has always focused on honoring the vibrant vision Bruce Lee sketched out—not just supplying incredible fight scenes, but also depicting a tapestry of relationships and rivalries among the various denizens of this specific city at this boisterous, dangerous time. On the show new and established Chinese immigrants constantly interact with Irish immigrants, business owners, rich do-gooders, flawed cops, and calculating politicians. The show features characters of many different backgrounds and worldviews, but at no point are the Asian characters marginalized, caricatured, or created in the passive mold of too many AAPI characters in American TV history.

“Representation was on our mind when the series was first developed. It’s part of the show’s resonance and has only become more essential,” Bloys said.

Indeed, the drama has always woven the nation’s dangerous and even deadly addiction to anti-Asian racism and violence into the fabric of its narrative. The real-life waves of murders and attacks against AAPI communities, now and in recent years, mean that Warrior’s clear-eyed depictions of similar historical patterns and racist power structures make it exceptionally relevant.

“I don’t think we have to manufacture anything or have more of a sense of urgency” about those themes going forward, Lee noted. “I think the urgency is already there.”

“This show struck such a deep chord for the global Asian diaspora that lives outside of Asia. People see themselves in this show,” added Olivia Cheng, who plays the resourceful businesswoman Ah Toy. “I’ve gotten so many messages from Asian fans who’ve binged Warrior in the midst of depression and exhaustion from enduring racism…. Seeing people who look like them literally fighting racists onscreen gave them reason to hold their heads up high and fight on.

“Look what had to happen for the world to stop gaslighting Asians around our lived experiences of racism. Our elders had to be beaten, mutilated, set on fire, and stomped out. Six Asian women and two others had to be mass murdered by a white incel. The narrative around Asians being some silent, rich, monolithic community with no struggles is a narrative imposed on us by institutions like Hollywood. We are so over being erased and made invisible. Getting to center our own stories and become fully human onscreen means life or death to my community right now…. Renewing Warrior is a step toward hope.”

In my experience, the passion and commitment Cheng brings to the project are easy to find among the show’s cast and creative team. Justin Lin certainly has plenty on his plate, but by all accounts, he was front and center in the efforts to keep the show going. His commitment hasn’t wavered even as he rolls out F9 and preps a slew of additional Fast & Furious sequels.

“I think you can hear it in my voice—there is no hindrance. There’s no obstacle. We’re gonna make this happen,” said Lin, who spoke with me at length about the revival earlier this week. “I don’t have the specifics, and maybe I’m going to sleep even less, but that’s okay. It’s a high-class problem.”

As Shannon Lee has noted in the past, her father, Bruce Lee, could not get Warrior made while he was alive. I asked her what he’d think about its extraordinary resilience in this moment.

“I just think that he would be, and is, thrilled and that his energy is all over this and that we are a reflection of him,” Lee said. “And if there’s any way he’s up there orchestrating any of this, then he’s like, ‘Yeah! You got it, baby. Here we go!’”

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