Looking into 'Interior Chinatown'

I was not familiar with Charles Yu’s original novel and namesake of the show. Perhaps the most ringing endorsement of Interior Chinatown is that after five episodes (half of the full season order, but all that was provided for the screeners) is that I ordered a copy of the book because I was intimately curious with how such a clever metatextual piece of fiction functioned in a text-based format, but I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself.

Interior Chinatown is a new series premiering on November 19th that plays jump rope with genre. Charles Yu also serves as the showrunner series, whose leading man is Jimmy O. Yang (who I was introduced to in Silicon Valley) and whose pilot was directed by Taiki Waititi (his production company is also one of sixth others involved with the series). The trailer itself spoke to all of my sensitivities. Crime procedurals. Asian American representation in media (specifically Chinese-American media, which should not come as a surprise given the title of the series). A slight film noir bent as Yang’s Willus Wu becomes an unsuspecting witness to an abduction and then becomes involved in a series of criminal investigations. You may remember, but Pornsak Pichetshote’s The Good Asian was one of my favorite comics of yesterday, and while Interior Chinatown had a decidedly more comedic bent, the fact that any comparison can be drawn in favorable.

The show wastes absolutely no time vamping off the genre it so clearly loves as Willis informs his friend and co-worker about the “cold open” and how in the beginning of every procedural we meet someone who is either about to be a witness or dead body. While neither happens immediately, it does set the self-aware tone between tongue-and-cheek references, head nods, lampshade hanging, and every single trope in the rule book, but this is a fantastic time to remind you dear reader that tropes are tools, and Interior Chinatown has a deep toolkit.

In short order, we get some internal narration, an introduction to BLACK & WHITE: Impossible Crime Unit (something that may or may not be an imagined framing device), and a run down that this is a story that will feel familiar as it has to deal with grief, specifically the disappearance of Willis’s older brother years ago. And throughout the ridiculous antics, the over-the-top language, and super intentional lighting changes, perhaps the most indicative sign post that this is a work of fiction is that the cops actually give a modicum of concern about culture, as they bring in Detective Lana Lee (former Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D alum Chloe Bennett) as a Chinatown expert. Soon enough Lana and Willis cross paths and shenanigans occur.

Throughout the five episodes I was able to watch, the show was marked by clever dialog, smart direction, and cinematography. While the first two episodes didn’t quite commit to the gimmicks it started to instantiate, by the third episode, the metafictional nature of the story was doubled down on and the show went from good fish out of water story to great metaphor about the Asian American experience pretty much in real time. Imagine Supernatural‘s “Changing Channels” except instead of “learning to play a role in the apocalypse” it’s “here are the societal expectations of Asian Americans in the United States,” and you have a solid idea of the show’s modus operandi.

Interior Chinatown is a show that revels in showing off. The episode names are perfectly idiosyncratic. So many of the experiences that Willis and his immediate circles go through ring true whether it’s the karaoke nights, the sharing of meals, the home movie VHSes. The scenes are staged with a discerning eye with intricate attention paid to the lighting, framing, and filters, and fight choreography that, while nothing extraordinary, is easy to watch and cut in a way that feels reminiscent of old Jackie Chan cop movies (which given everything was almost certainly intentional).

The individual episodes work in service of the larger serial, and while it takes a second for the myth arc to really materialize, it unified the quote unquote real and quote unquote dramatic narratives beautifully. And while Jimmy O. Yang’s Willis Wu and Chloe Bennett’s Detective Lana Lee are the clear stars of the show, the rest of the cast more than carry the screen time they are given. Whether that’s Ronny Chieng’s Fatty Choi covering for Willis at the restaurant and living through perhaps the most harrowing experience, waiting on white people, or Sullivan Jones’s Miles Turners and Lisa Gilroy’s Sarah Green perfectly capturing the mannerisms and mentality of every fictional modern cop blended into two archetypes. Lisa Gilroy particularly stands out when it comes to chewing the scenery. Although, I’m not too surprised by that since I adore her improv work especially what I’ve seen on Dropout.

All in all, Interior Chinatown is late entry in 2024’s must watch TV, but it definitely earns a spot at least on my list. Endlessly clever and inventive, the show is all of my favorite parts of procedurals with a sharp intent to use the genre convention to comment on being Asian American in ways that are both deliberately ambiguous but also deeply personal and specific. While I haven’t used old movies as the foundation to investigate my brother’s mysterious disappearance in a vague conspiracy, I have had the experience of attempting to learn more about family no longer with me only through the artifacts that they left behind. I’m a mixed Filipino American. The details don’t quite match up, but the feelings, the emotions of feeling like a background character, of having to subsume to specific roles, the expectations placed to do great things…all of those hit in all the best ways.

The full series comes out on November 19, and you can bet that I’ll be watching the rest of the series the moment in becomes available to the rest of the public because I am very much invested in seeing how it all turns out. And until then, I’m going to hope my copy of the book comes in so I can get an early glimpse and see the magic of meta-fictional work in a strictly screenplay format.