Interior Chinatown Season One Review

Interior Chinatown, the newest Hulu/Disney+ series, based on the book of the same name by Charles Yu, is an exercise in how attractive the streaming giant can make their original programming grab a new audience. It tells the story that on its surface appears highly familiar as it centers around Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), a seemingly unimportant background actor in a fictional police procedural, but then quickly shifts into the surreal as Willis begins to realize the borders of his forced role and seeks to slowly expand and eventually break free from their constraints. This realization causes a slowly progressing detection by Willis and others he interacts with that there is more to what is occurring around them and with the help of his family, friends, and two paint-by-numbers TV detectives he starts to unravel the mystery of why everyone in his life is playing a specific role without the possibility of change.

Willis’ role is not just that of a background actor, but also a younger brother who lost his older brother twelve years ago after he was working as a police informant on the very same procedural that he is stuck inside. This loss has fractured his family to the extent where his mother and father exist within the same apartment building but hardly interact and Willis is not only left to balance both relationships but also carries the shadow of not living up to the same potential as his older brother with his parents. This serves as not only his background character’s backstory but is the motivating factor in seeking to break free from his Truman Show-esque loop. Even more interesting is how Willis incrementally works his way up the ladder of narrative importance throughout each episode as he takes on larger roles such as “Delivery Guy,” “Tech Guy,” “Translator,” and “Bad Guy” all in his search for what happened to his older brother. This not only creates a multi-layered pathway for Willis to become a main character within what’s perceived to be his own story but also allows the series to focus on his family members as they begin overcoming their grief in different ways which enables their stories to also become part of the larger narrative within this homogenized police procedural.

At first, Interior Chinatown can be a test of patience on its audience as it becomes a slow burn for Willis to begin realizing that everything around him is confined to certain laws of existence within the police procedural and that there is no allowance for characters to stray from the path that they’ve been written into, however, Willis starts to realize that much that can be accomplished if his character bends the narrative rules to achieve his goals. A great example of this is Willis’ inability to enter the police station to gain information on his older brother’s disappearance, but when he attempts to enter as a delivery guy from the restaurant his character works at, he is granted full access with no one even looking up at him. As these rules are slowly identified and bent to suit Willis, the series begins to chip away at these traditional narrative cracks that audiences have been exposed to consistently with similar TV programming each week, thus revealing a series that is playing with several genres at once while also being extremely self-referential. In addition, as the series weaves in several secondary storylines involving Willis’ family members and friends it rapidly evolves into a product where the emotional investment from its audience is paid off in a highly interesting conclusion.

While Interior Chinatown possesses elements from predictable TV series, it delivers an emotionally impactful story while simultaneously calling attention to the fact that the entertainment industry has continued to exist and thrive off of creating products that contain these very roles and that audiences will continue to watch and support them is something beyond meta. It’s a beautiful attack on the perceived perfection of television that attempts to masquerade as real life but never chooses to delve into the depths of the subject matter it portrays. In doing so, the series delves further by exploring those aforementioned emotional depths as Willis and his family begin to approach loss and how it has permanently altered his family.

In the end, Interior Chinatown may not for everyone but for those who choose to begin its journey and stick with it until the end, its payoff will have viewers thinking well after its credits have rolled. In some ways, its message will subvert expectations when it comes to future procedurals and how milquetoast they’ve become in glossing over the very true impact of the subject matters they choose to explore. Its subtle humor, emotional depths, and stellar cast all contribute to something that might not be highly talked about but is truly a unique exploration into the machine of an industry that seeks safety in similarity.

still courtesy of Hulu

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Critics w/o Credentials

Trying my best to get all thoughts about TV and Film out of my head and onto the interweb.