Interior Chinatown Review – Ambitious Yet Tiresome Adaptation Of Charles Yu’s Novel | Television

TAlthough written in the form of a teleplay, Interior Chinatown, the 2020 National Book Award-winning novel by Charles Yu, is not the most natural fit for the screen. Part surreal exploration of identity, part debunking of Hollywood’s limited view of Asian Americans, it’s a tricky and brilliant balance on the page that doesn’t necessarily translate from it. Yu, a writer on such shows as Westworld and Lodge 49, along with Taika Waititi as executive producer, is leading the charge on a dizzyingly circular task: the TV adaptation of his novel, in which everyone toils in a TV show. If that sounds too meta, well, that’s both the point and the show’s central flaw—at least in the first half of 10 episodes made available to critics, which chases its own tail into a criminal conspiracy, TV parody, and shows within shows.

Yu has changed some of the book’s narrative, but we’re still focused on Willis Wu (Jimmy O Yang), a frustrated waiter at his Uncle Wong’s (Archie Kao) restaurant in a Los Angeles-esque Chinatown and a perpetual background actor in Black and White, The Law & Order spoof crime drama filmed there. Although he dreams of being a kung fu guy like his long-lost older brother (Chris Pang), Willis has only a meager selection of options; at best, as he tells his speechless best friend and colleague Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng) in the first scene, that if you’re in the first scene of a show, you’re either a victim or a witness.

Willis witnesses a crime. Or maybe there was a crime – although Waititi and a stable of directors including Jaffar Mahmood, John Lee and Alice Wu employ various techniques of demarcation (shifts in lighting and music, shifting perspectives), the boundary between surrealism and reality, Willis’s imagination and the the real world remains blurred at best.

But overall, the kidnapping of a nail salon worker in Chinatown by a maybe-gang—a nebulous crime scene in a minority neighborhood that is, of course, a classic staple of American crime TV—breaks Willis out of his background silo and into the main cast of characters. He is still too small, too generic Asian man to be perceived by detectives Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Green (Lisa Gilroy), the satirically delicate stars of Black & White, but he connects with detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet). a department transfer who, due to his heritage, is relegated to Sidekick and Chinatown Expert. Lee, trying to take on the role of lead detective with his own nagging insecurities, vows to help Willis be the hero by reopening the long-cold investigation into his beloved brother’s disappearance—a tragedy that condemned Willis to the role of perpetually disappointing younger son and crushed his Taiwanese immigrant parents (the underutilized Diana Lin and Tzi Ma).

The plot details, stakes and time period – Interior Chinatown appears to be set around the millennium, a time of wired phones and boxy cars, but there’s also a hard seltzer ad soundtracked by the 2000 trance hit Sandstorm – are like the various tropes show spears, both fixed and malleable to the more important story. Each episode takes on the feel of a video game as Willis, the reluctant but desperate protagonist, literally unlocks new levels of mobility by taking on stereotypical roles: delivery man, technician, etc. This can make for cerebral viewing, if not particularly propulsive television. Stylized martial arts and SVU send-ups aside, the series’ surreal meta-ness is an admirable gambit that spans episodes, undermines momentum.

However, it wins back a lot in the more directly lived-in scenes of SRO housing (single room) above the restaurant, where Willis, his parents, Fatty and their friends party, argue, cook and heal. These scenes, which flow seamlessly between English and Mandarin, serve as a crucial grounding in reality for a series that can feel more like thought exercise – how do are you customizing this? – than a story about people. Bearing the exhaustion and determination of an actor long waiting for his shot, Yang is an endearing and believably worn protagonist. But the real standout is Chieng, a longtime Daily Show correspondent with the comedic comedic timing to show for it.

This dense thicket of fantasy, parody and allegory will probably make more sense to those who have read the book first. For everyone else, Interior Chinatown contains, I suspect, two too many bends in the maze to wind through 10 episodes in about 45 minutes. It’s a provocative and at times really entertaining exploration of how the stories we’ve been told shape how we think – the irony so well layered that it ironically gets in the way of itself.