Interior Chinatown (TV Program)

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    ‘Interior Chinatown’ Review: Off the Shelf

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    Charles Yu adapts his award-winning novel into a series that is both starkly different from the original and frustratingly familiar.“Interior Chinatown” was never going to be an easy adaptation. The novel’s success — which was considerable, including a National Book Award in 2020 — flowed from how seamlessly its author, Charles Yu, deployed the metafictional device at the book’s heart. His gimmick was simple enough in outline, but it was hard to see how it would work onscreen (even though it was, in part, about television).The adaptation is now here, in a 10-part mini-series that premiered Tuesday on Hulu, and it was overseen by Yu, who is both a novelist and a TV writer; he served as showrunner and wrote the first and last episodes. To keep his concept alive, he has stretched and twisted it to the breaking point — the onscreen “Interior Chinatown” is recognizable as an expansion of the book, and at the same time a completely different story and experience.It is an adroit and polished response to the different expectations of the screen-watching and book-reading audiences (and to a nearly seven-hour running time). It improves on the book in some ways, but in other, more obvious ways, it inherits the book’s problems. Overall, it reinforces the apparent difficulty of lifting Asian American characters out of the ghetto of good intentions and achingly familiar situations.In his novel, Yu gave a spin to a typical story of Asian American anxiety — Willis Wu, the son of immigrant parents, works in a Chinese restaurant while seething over his invisibility in mainstream America — by combining it with a satirical take on a “Law & Order”-like TV crime drama, written in screenplay format. (The title puns on “interior” as a screenwriting term.) Wu is a bit player, Generic Asian Man, in both the TV show and in his “real” life, which exist on different fictional planes but are cleverly intermingled. They are suffused in each other with such thoroughness that Yu, and Wu, barely need to move between them; the story is often in both worlds at the same time.Allegory is a tougher sell in the more literal world of the actual TV screen, however, and Yu has adjusted. The show takes the somewhat nebulous events of the book and, while still trafficking in plenty of flashy self-referential effects, presents a more conventional, linear plot with a jokey, sardonic style that replaces the book’s wistfulness. Most noticeably, the ethnic family drama has been condensed, while the cop-show component has grown to the point that it effectively takes over.The story’s two worlds now exist on the same plane: The restaurant worker Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) worms his way into the police department in order to investigate the death of his older brother, taking on Asian-accessible roles like tech guy and interrogation interpreter that the cops literally do not see.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘Interior Chinatown,’ the Sets Have Main Character Energy

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      The Hulu series unfolds in a Chinatown that “is both physical and psychological,” said Charles Yu, the creator. Here’s a look at how four key settings bring the story to life.Charles Yu’s novel “Interior Chinatown” is about stories. Stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell about others. Stories where only certain people get to be the main characters while others, like the protagonist Willis Wu, are relegated to playing bit parts.Yu structured the novel in the format of a screenplay. The title follows the scriptwriting convention of scene headings, which specify where the action is taking place (for example, INT. UNMARKED POLICE CAR). Scene headings are peppered throughout the book, and in Hulu’s series adaptation, which premiered on Tuesday, the settings are just as essential, and more tangible, to the overall concept.“Willis has this world that he lives in, this Chinatown which is both physical and psychological,” said Yu, the show’s creator and showrunner, in a video interview. “When you write a book, you get to use the reader as your ultimate collaborator. You’re leveraging off someone else’s imagination.”“You can’t really film that, unfortunately,” he added.So in constructing the sets of the show, he said, “it was like, how do you build a place that feels real and lived in — and at the same time can feel subjective and evocative of the Chinatown that comes from the novel, which is an interior Chinatown that functions as a place where people work and live but also as a mental space?”Here’s a look at four of the key settings in “Interior Chinatown” and how they bring the story to three-dimensional life.Int. Golden Palace RestaurantWillis Wu, the protagonist, spends much of his time waiting tables in the dining room of the Golden Palace Restaurant.Mine Taing/HuluWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Interior Chinatown’ Puts Stereotypes in the Spotlight

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      Adapted by Charles Yu from his own novel, this series about a man stuck inside a cop show satirizes Hollywood’s penchant for pigeonholing Asian actors.One of Jimmy O. Yang’s first TV roles was Asian Teenager No. 2, in a 2013 episode of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”“The part was for someone who could speak Cantonese; I think that’s why I got it,” he said in a recent interview. He remembers the constant competition back then among Asian actors for roles with one or two lines, “an episode of something shooting in Chinatown,” he said, “or a part in the background at a community college.”Such work might sound like small potatoes. But in an industry that has historically struggled to put Asian actors and characters in the foreground, every rung of the ladder counts.Now Yang, who was born in Hong Kong and came to the United States when he was 13, is at the center of a limited series that turns the struggle into mind-swirling metafiction. “Interior Chinatown,” adapted by the showrunner Charles Yu from his own 2020 novel, is a TV series based on a book about a life unfolding inside a TV series.“The elevator pitch is that it’s ‘Law & Order’ meets ‘The Truman Show,’” Yu said. “It starts as a straightforward mystery and gets into something weirder, a metaphysical mystery hopefully.”“Interior Chinatown,” premiering with all 10 episodes Tuesday on Hulu, is also an affectionate sendup of the police procedural, and a sly piece of media criticism about Asian stereotypes in entertainment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More