The novel “Interior Chinatown” is formatted like a script, taking its title from the screenwriting convention of beginning scenes by indicating whether they take place indoors or out. Its author, Charles Yu, frequently works in television, with credits on shows like “Westworld” and “Legion.” (Yu’s brother, Kelvin, created the Disney+ series “American Born Chinese.”) And the book is principally a commentary on film and TV tropes as they relate to Asian-American stereotypes, a project that could well be furthered by a jump to the screen.
But despite a background so seemingly suited for adaptation, “Interior Chinatown” struggles as an actual show. Yu himself created the 10-episode Hulu series, partnering with executive producer and pilot director Taika Waititi to bring the novel’s surreal, allegorical world to life. Compared to a book’s hermetically sealed environment, television requires a multiplicity of perspectives and the forward momentum of plot, especially when stretched — as Yu has opted to — into 45-minute installments. These necessary elements end up diluting, rather than augmenting, the novel’s original insights, turning a singular, compact fable into a middling mystery.
“Silicon Valley” star Jimmy O. Yang leads the cast of “Interior Chinatown” as Willis Wu, a waiter at his uncle’s Golden Palace restaurant who occasionally stumbles into the background of a police procedural called “Black & White.” When Willis crosses path with the star detectives, Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Green (Lisa Gilroy) — yes, the show-within-a-show’s title is a reference to their races — the entire vibe shifts. The light turns an antiseptic blue; the focus shifts from Willis to the oblivious cops who never acknowledge his existence. The visual gimmick recalls the short-lived AMC dramedy “Kevin Can F*** Himself,” which shifted perspectives between a housewife’s bleak existence and the bright, multi-camera sitcom her husband lives inside of.
As with “Kevin,” this storytelling device helps “Interior Chinatown” make an immediate impact, but quickly runs out of steam. The visual element allows the show expertly to ape the rhythms and mock the clichés of a “Law & Order”-like franchise; Gilroy, in particular, excels at delivering absurd dialogue that pushes quippy banter to its limit. But with viewers forced to rely on context clues in lieu of written exposition, “Interior Chinatown” has difficulty communicating the rules of its fantasy world and overlapping realities.
Located in the fictional city of Port Harbor, Willis’ home is a Chinatown in the “forget it, Jake” sense — in the public imagination, it’s a den of iniquity where crimes go down, not a place where people live. To leave the district, residents must pass through a single tunnel laden with symbolic import. (Los Angeles residents will recognize it as the 2nd Street passageway.) But the sense of Port Harbor as an unreal place governed by Hollywood logic is undermined by more grounded subplots like Willis’ mother Lily (Diana Lin) getting her real estate license. The point, of course, is that Chinatown’s residents are more than just the roles they’ve been assigned, some of which — like “Generic Asian Man” and “Tech Guy” — provide the title of each episode. But in the world of “Interior Chinatown,” everyone is a concept before they’re a person, making such storylines less effective at subversion than muddled in tone.
The central mystery of “Interior Chinatown” involves the disappearance of Willis’ older brother (Chris Pang), a kung fu master trained by their father (Tzi Ma). Willis partners with Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet), a mixed-race detective assigned to Green and Turner’s squad for “cultural” reasons, to find out what really happened to his sibling. It’s hard to put much stock in their investigative work, though, since Chinatown doesn’t operate under the laws of nature, like basic cause and effect, that reward pounding the pavement. At one point, a bomb targeting the local police precinct magically defuses itself, establishing a baseline that lowers the stakes of Willis and Lana’s efforts.
Those efforts nonetheless take up many hours of screen time, and are padded out by even thinner material like Willis’ friend Fatty (Ronny Chieng) accidentally drawing crowds to Golden Palace by being overly rude to white patrons — a one-note joke sustained for too many beats. Willis’ brother was tokenized and demeaned by an earlier generation of TV detectives, on a show Willis and Lana watch episodes of in lieu of “evidence tapes.” His fate is inevitably bound up in what “Interior Chinatown” wants to say about representation and the, well, interiority of those being represented. But by delaying the reveal, “Interior Chinatown” puts off some substance in favor of wheel-spinning that’s not as engaging in practice as an abstract idea. Stuck between fable and character drama, “Interior Chinatown” ends up in the same no-man’s-land as its protagonist.
All 10 episodes of “Interior Chinatown” are now streaming on Hulu.
