Legacies already lost Penelope Park after Season 1 and it certainly looks like we just lost The Vampire Diaries' Kai Parker in Legacies Season 2. Is Alyssa Chang next? Maybe not, but some good news for Olivia Liang on another The CW show may ultimately mean bad news for fans of her new Legacies character.
Olivia Liang just landed the lead role in The CW's pilot for Kung Fu, a reimagining of the 1970s TV series starring David Carradine. I'm not normally big on reboots and remakes, but this new show actually sounds pretty cool -- especially with Olivia Liang in the lead role.
According to Deadline, a quarter-life crisis causes a young Chinese-American woman, Nicky Chen (Liang), to drop out of college and go on a life-changing journey to an isolated monastery in China. But when she returns to find her hometown overrun with crime and corruption, she uses her martial arts skills and Shaolin values to protect her community and bring criminals to justice, all while searching for the assassin who killed her Shaolin mentor and is now targeting her.
Kung Fu is reported to co-star Tzi Ma and Kheng Hua Tan as Olivia Liang/Nicky Chen's parents, plus Jon Prasida, Shannon Dang, and Eddie Liu.
Since Kung Fu is only a pilot at this point, we'll have to wait and see if The CW picks it up for a full series for the 2020-2021 TV season. That might be the deciding factor on whether Olivia Liang leaves Legacies or not. She could always still be a guest star if she gets a new series regular role, but that might also be pushing it with her new schedule.
Whatever happens next, congrats to Olivia Liang for this amazing new role! She's clearly excited about it:
Right now, Olivia Liang is just recurring on Legacies Season 2 as Alyssa Chang, but I was hoping she would be promoted to series regular status for Season 3, which The CW already announced as happening.
The character of Alyssa has only been on Legacies Season 2 for a few episodes, but she has such a strong presence and has been connected to so many storylines -- Hope's roommate, hating the Saltzmans, in love triangles with MG, Jed, and maybe even Kaleb. She's even the reason we got Kai Parker back. Alyssa got to work briefly with Kai in "You Can't Save Them All" until it was revealed that he deceived her too. She's not quite the villain he is, she didn't actually want to kill the Saltzmans, she just wanted to lock them away in the Prison World.
As a witch with an attitude, but one who isn't really all that bad, Alyssa kinda sorta reminded fans of Penelope Park. Not that anyone could ever replace Penelope, but she's bringing some of her confident power back to the show.
In my perfect world, both Penelope and Alyssa would be part of Legacies Season 3. But we'll have to see if Lulu Antariksa's Penelope can come back and what happens with Olivia Liang's new Kung Fu show. At least we should be seeing Aunt Freya Mikaelson again at some point in the future!
Meanwhile, fans are just waiting for Legacies Season 2 to return to TV. The most recent episode aired February 13, 2020 and the show won't return with a new episode until Thursday, March 12. It should be a good one, though, with black-and-white Film Noir Josie. That will be Episode 14 of what's expected to be 20 episodes for the 2019-2020 season.
