To tell stories of ethnic success is to speak about the nation in all its benevolence and generosity. National ideologies such as the American Dream, mobility, openness, and inclusiveness come to life any time the nation’s Others claim socioeconomic achievement. Stories of success turn the ethnic into the national as the former partakes of, and legitimizes, narratives of the latter. Alternatively, the ethnic can, on occasion, command the attention of the nation through the notion of success. The blockbuster status of the independent film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, released in 2002, is a case in point: the representation of an ethnic group within popular culture is such a hit that it generates a metadiscourse in the media about the film’s unprecedented popularity, and that, in turn, becomes its own kind of ethnic success story. The 1998 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary The Greek Americans provides yet another example of ethnicity’s impact on national cultural production. Indeed, the immense popularity of the documentary, largely framed as a tribute to Greek-American “success,” led PBS executive producers to launch a new series, “Homelands,” and to select Greece and Greek Americans as the first case study for this “new concept” that explores the transnational ties of American ethnic groups (“Return to the Homeland”). Ethnic accomplishment becomes a privileged metric for the national ranking of ethnicities, thereby raising many interesting questions: What is the cultural work of identity narratives that center on ethnic success? What kinds of issues does the success of popular representations of ethnicity raise? Furthermore, how do narratives of achievements by assimilated “white” ethnic groups intersect with the “assimilation” of racial minorities such as Asian Americans? And what are at the social and political stakes when “white” ethnics script their identities around achievement?