Though 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 sendup of Hollywood’s limited view of Asian Americans, it’s a tricky and brilliant balance on the page that doesn’t necessarily translate off it. Yu, a writer for such shows as Westworld and Lodge 49, along with Taika Waititi as executive producer, leads the charge on a dizzyingly circular task: the TV adaptation of his novel in which everyone toils in a TV show. If it 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 for 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-ish Chinatown and a perpetual background actor in Black and White, the Law & Order-spoof crime drama filmed there. Though he dreams of being a kung fu guy like his long-missing older brother (Chris Pang), Willis has only a measly range of options available; at best, as he tells his aimless best friend and co-worker Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng) in the first scene, if you’re in the first scene of a show, you’re either a victim or a witness.
