Plot: Based on Charles Yu’s award-winning book of the same name, the show follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural called Black & White. Relegated to the background, Willis goes through the motions of his on-screen job, waiting tables, dreaming about a world beyond Chinatown and aspiring to be the lead of his own story. When Willis inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, he begins to unravel a criminal web in Chinatown, while discovering his own family’s buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.
Review: Interior Chinatown is an interesting approach to telling a meta-fictional story. Rather than breaking the fourth wall or setting a story within a story, this series takes the approach of interconnecting characters often relegated to the background and showing how they can break free of their stereotypical and cliche constraints to become fully realized protagonists in their own stories. Based on the novel by Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown is awash in the tropes of television cop shows, past and present, and uses them to explore the idea of identity within a blend of comedy and mystery. With Taika Waititi aboard as executive producer and director, Interior Chinatown is a unique series with standout turns from the ensemble cast by Jimmy O. Yang and Chloe Bennet.
Set across ten episodes, each titled after a generic background character often seen in police procedurals, Interior Chinatown centers on Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), a hapless waiter working in his uncle’s restaurant. Willis lives in a one-bedroom apartment near his mother, Lily (Diana Lin), an aspiring realtor, and his father, Sifu (Tzi Ma), a martial arts instructor. Willis’ older brother (Chris Pang) disappeared years earlier, and his absence still serves as a rift for the family. When Willis spots a woman getting kidnapped by masked men, his life is drawn into the police investigation led by Detective Sarah Green (Lisa Gilroy) and her partner Miles Turner (Sullivan Jones). Green and Turner have been assigned to work with a Chinatown expert, Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet), who seeks out Willis to help her investigate. Willis encounters challenges in trying to break out of the mundane and banal life he leads in more ways than one.
Having seen the first five episodes, I was unsure what to expect from Interior Chinatown. Adapting the National Book Award-winning novel, which has its own way of illustrating the complex world these characters inhabit, seems like it would have been a challenge. Still, Charles Yu and Taika Waititi opened this series by setting up some of the rules of this world. While there are some parallels with the world of Free Guy in which the non-playable characters take center stage, the twists show how the world of Interior Chinatown functions are all built on lighting, camera styles, visual tone, and creative set design. Anyone who has seen an episode of Law & Order will recognize the visual cues of that series and similar cop shows, but the transition from that world to the world of Willis Wu is done seamlessly without overtly telling audiences what is going on. As each episode progresses, we follow Willis as he evolves from a waiter to a delivery guy, then a tech guy, and beyond as his ownership of his life expands. At the same time, the reason for his brother’s disappearance and why Lana Lee has entered Willis’ story become more apparent.
Jimmy O. Yang, who has had memorable turns in Silicon Valley and Space Force and success as a stand-up comedian, brings a layered performance to Willis Wu. Having to balance the surreal nature of this story along with some comedy, drama, and martial arts never phases the unexpected lead. Yang’s success is also due to a solid ensemble cast, including veteran actors Tzi Ma and Diana Lin as Willis’ parents, reuniting after playing a couple in The Farewell. Lisa Gilroy and Sullivan Jones are perfect as the procedural cops slowly realize something is off in their routine. Chloe Bennet plays Lana Lee with a hidden agenda that comes into focus as the series progresses. Bennet is initially seen through the male gaze, but her character becomes more integral to Willis’ journey in each episode. Archie Kao, Lauren Tom, and Chris Pang are great is supporting roles, but the standout is Ronny Chieng as Willis’ best friend, Fatty Choi. While Fatty’s journey is far different than Willis’ at the start of the series, The Daily Show correspondent gets to be incredibly funny as the best on-screen waiter I have seen in a long time.
Taika Waititi directed the first episode of the eight-episode series. Stephanie Liang and John Lee each directed two entries, and Ben Sinclair, Jaffar Mahmood, Alice Wu, Anu Valia, and Pete Chatmon each helmed an episode. Charles Yu led the adaptation of his own novel, which was a massive undertaking as this story was already complex as a book. Yu scripted the first and final episode of Interior Chinatown, enlisting Eva Anderson, Matt Okumura, Tiffany So, Saba Saghafi, Naiem Bouier, Keiko Green, Lauren Otero, Alex Russell, and Greg Cabrera to faithfully adapt the less-than-three-hundred page novel by adding new characters and exploring the mystery at the center of the series in a way that works on screen. The visual tricks used to transition between the worlds are mostly technical in nature. They may not have been as readily apparent during filming as they are in the finished product, but across the five episodes that I have seen, it is handled in a manner that I have not seen done in any other series or film before.
Interior Chinatown takes the idea of stereotypes and flips them on its head, offering a story about more than Asian-American identity. It also pays deep heed to the journey of immigrants from abroad to the United States. Jimmy O. Yang is a great choice to play the unassuming lead in a story he would usually have been a supporting player in. Without seeing the second half of the season, I anticipate that Interior Chinatown will become one of the better stories of identity and culture clashes, finding a place alongside Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Farewell, and The Sympathizer. Interior Chinatown is a truly unique approach to storytelling that brings comedy, mystery, drama, and surreal fantasy together to tell a great story as well as a story about storytelling.
Interior Chinatown premieres on November 19th on Hulu.
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