The producers of the new CW series Kung Fu couldn’t have planned it this way, but their show managed to premiere at just the right time.

The violence problem didn’t appear in the last few months, of course, but the shocking murder of Asian-American women in Atlanta last month, and subsequent reports of brazen daytime beatings of older Asian-American people on city streets brought more attention to the issue. So the launch now of a major network show that features a predominantly Asian cast and creative team is as fortuitous as it is fortunate.

“I think the timing of our show is really impeccable,” star Olivia Liang said at a recent press conference. “We Asians need to see ourselves represented on the screens, but we need to be invited into people’s homes who don’t see us in their everyday life, just to humanize us, normalize seeing us, remind them that we are people just like they are and that we have a place in this world, and hopefully having our show in their homes will expand that worldview for them.”

Developed by Christina M. Kim, the new Kung Fu is an update of the David Carradine series that debuted in 1972. This version isn’t about Carradine’s wandering monk, Kwai Chang Caine, but rather Liang’s Nicky Shen, a college dropout from San Francisco who finds a new home at a Shaolin monastery in China. The monastery trains its female residents in mastery of the martial arts, but that ends when a mysterious assailant kills her mentor. With no one to train her, she returns to the Bay Area and tries to reconnect with her parents (Tzi Ma and Kheng Hua Tan), while also using her new fighting skills to keep the streets safe, all while being stalked by the same person who killed her mentor.

“In the original series, the lead character was not Asian,” Kim commented at the press day. “For me, it was important that we change that, and for myself as a woman, I really wanted a strong female Asian lead who was kicking butt and was the role model that I wished I had on TV growing up.”

Liang tells USA Today that what makes Kung Fu stand out from other shows on the network is that Nicky is not a vigilante.

“Nicky is heroic, but she doesn’t see herself as a hero,” she said. “She doesn’t have a hero complex where she is going out to find bad guys. She sees bad things happening and feels like she needs to do something about it.”

The actress told the paper that she made a vow to herself that she wasn’t going to add marital arts to her list of special skills unless it was for a role.

“When I started off in the industry, people would ask me why martial arts wasn’t on my resume because it was such a typecast for Asians to do martial arts roles,” Liang said. “So I made a promise to myself. I was like, ‘I’ll never learn martial arts until someone pays me to learn martial arts.'”

Tan said the new series would emphasize stories of “social justice” by showing how “characters of all ages and all walks of life trying to work together to do what’s best for the community to help.” Added Ma: “What happened in Atlanta breaks my heart. I’m not sure what the short-term fix is, and I believe we are the long-term solution.”

The series focuses on more than just Liang by putting a spotlight on her Chinese-American family, with equal story weight given to Nicky’s parents. She adds that “what our writers have done so beautifully is make this a multi-generational show. When we see parents in shows, they’re not really the main storyline. They’re just there to move the plot along.”

The show premieres this week and will air Wednesday nights on The CW.