‘Interior Chinatown’ review: A very ambitious, very meta police procedural spoof

“I feel like I’m a background character in someone else’s story.”

So goes the internal monologue of Interior Chinatown protagonist Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), who works as a waiter in Chinatown. While Willis’ musings about his role in life could just be the result of aimless angst, they are actually 100-percent true.

That’s because this Chinatown is not what it seems. It’s part of the fictional town of Port Harbour, which is the setting of the cop show Black & White. Willis and everyone around him in Chinatown are simply bit players in a larger story. They just don’t know it.

That tension between Willis’ reality and the reality of Black & White drives Interior Chinatown, which showrunner Charles Yu adapts from his National Book Award-winning novel of the same name. Like the novel, Interior Chinatown dissects Asian representation in media, focusing on tropes and archetypes that often relegate Asian stories to the background. The result, which often takes the form of a spot-on pastiche of police procedurals, is one of the most ambitious, meta shows of the year.

What’s Interior Chinatown about?

Unknowingly trapped within a police procedural, Willis is a devotee of cop shows himself. But he never thought he could be the hero of one. The way he sees it, someone who looks like him is usually a waiter, a witness, or a victim. Very rarely is a Chinatown resident a winner — unless they’re his older brother (Chris Pang), whose skills as “Kung Fu Guy” earned him heroic renown. At least, until his disappearance, which remains unsolved.

But when Wilson witnesses a crime himself, he finds himself inching closer and closer to that coveted hero status. He’ll join forces with the eternally cool Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet) in order to solve the crime, only to realize something much larger and stranger is going on in Chinatown — and it may all link back to his brother.

Interior Chinatown offers up killer style and substance.

Given that it lifts its name from the formatting of screenplay scene headings, it’s a given that Interior Chinatown (or Int. Chinatown) takes a deeply meta approach to media. Its fake intro sequence for Black & White — centered on Black detective Turner (Sullivan Jones) and white detective Green (Lisa Gilroy) — is a nearly one-to-one riff on Law & Order SVU. Scenes involving Turner and Green are bathed in a piercing blue light to denote we’re in an episode of Black & White. As soon as they head out, Interior Chinatown reverts to a warmer look.

Mashable Top Stories

The ever-changing cinematography — which bears shades of other genre-switching shows like The Afterparty and Kevin Can F**k Himself — isn’t the only way Interior Chinatown signals which storytelling mode we’re in. Willis tends to be front and center when Turner and Green aren’t in the picture. But as soon as they pop up, they become the focus. Willis is either pushed far to the back or rendered completely invisible. Turner and Green will have full discussions while Willis is next to them, all without noticing him once.

Here, and throughout the show, Yu gestures to the ways in which Asian stories are flattened or pushed aside in American media and real life. Willis has to fight his way into the narrative of Black & White after the doors to the police precinct mysteriously shut him — and only him — out. The only way in is to assume stereotypical roles, going from “Generic Asian Man” to “Delivery Man” to “Tech Guy.” To live in Black & White‘s Chinatown is to be an archetype. Embody the “right” one and you may find yourself assimilating.

Willis isn’t the only person in Interior Chinatown to struggle with the roles they’ve been conditioned to inhabit. As the only Asian American detective on the police force, Lana is tokenized as the “Chinatown expert,” even though she knows very little about the neighborhood. Willis’ friend and fellow waiter Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng) learns that his anger at white customers can be commodified and celebrated as authenticity by those same customers. Meanwhile, Willis’ mother Lily (Diana Lin) hopes to accomplish her dreams of becoming a successful real estate agent, even though everyone around her is doubtful.

In the first five episodes sent to critics, these latter two subplots occasionally threaten to bloat Interior Chinatown and drag focus away from its central mysteries. However, they also do the very opposite of what Black & White does, which is create space for its Asian side characters as more than just props.

Interior Chinatown is a blast.

That audiences already know the “twist” of Interior Chinatown — that it’s all in a TV show — doesn’t detract from the show’s wild ride. The characters aren’t aware that their reality is a curated fantasy, so watching them try to put the pieces together adds an extra layer of fun. Plus, there are more mysteries for the audience to unravel, like what happened to Willis’ brother, and what’s going on with the mysterious street gang known as the Painted Faces.

Interior Chinatown also finds plenty of fun in satirizing cop shows and the TV landscape at large. Everything from corny detective one-liners to extras’ background movements (why are they always moving boxes?) gets sent up.

Between these parodies and its musings on identity, Interior Chinatown already proves that it’s a sharply constructed show with a lot to say. But with the help of its dizzying genre switch-ups and some dynamic direction from episode directors like Taika Waititi, Alice Wu (The Half of It), and more, the show jumps into the realm of fearlessly unique, making a place all for itself.

All episodes of Interior Chinatown premiere Nov. 19 on Hulu.