‘Interior Chinatown’ Review: Jimmy O. Yang Steps up in a Hulu Mystery Too Meta for Its Own Good

A strange irony lies at the heart of Hulu’s Interior Chinatown. Its protagonist is Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), an unassuming waiter who’s always dreamt of being the hero but despairs of forever being relegated to, as he sighs, “a background character in someone else’s story.” Ostensibly, this very show represents his chance to change that — to take control of his own narrative, to seize his own destiny, to carve out his own role in a world all too eager to shove him into a series of stereotypical boxes.

But the only way that Interior Chinatown can apparently think to achieve that is by shoving him into yet another box, this time as an avatar for someone else’s cultural analysis. It’s a bigger box, to be sure, with more room for experimentation and cheeky self-awareness. But it’s a box all the same, prioritizing the tidy confines of its own meta narrative over his unique selfhood.

The cleverness is fun to start, though. “The person in the first scene of a procedural is either a victim or a witness,” Willis muses to a friend in the opening minutes — and lo and behold, he becomes the latter just minutes later when he spots a woman being abducted in an alley. Simultaneously intrigued and intimidated by the sense that this might be his opportunity to become part of the action, he reports the incident to Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet), a police officer he happens to have a crush on. Before long, the unofficial partners are tugging at a thread that could wind all the way back to the unsolved disappearance, some dozen years prior, of Willis’ older brother (Chris Pang).

The premiere, credited to Yu and directed by Taika Waititi, pulls out every bell and whistle to direct our attention to the fact that Interior Chinatown isn’t just telling a story but telling a story about the kinds of stories that get told. Like WandaVision or Kevin Can F Himself, it uses the visual language of television to tell the medium about itself.

So Green (Lisa Gilroy) and Turner (Sullivan Jones), the lead detectives on the case, aren’t just arrogant cop characters — they’re presented here as the stars of a crime procedural called Black & White: Impossible Crimes Unit (because he’s Black and she’s white, get it?), complete with its own Law & Order-esque title cards, music cues and mood lighting. When the pair walk into a room, the camera turns inexorably toward them, shoving Willis to the edges of the frame when it’s not cutting him out entirely.

Elsewhere, visual references abound to everyone from Wong Kar-wai to Bruce Lee. If Willis’ Chinatown looks like an anonymous studio backlot dressed to stand in for any Chinatown in America, that’s the point. Interior Chinatown is fluent in both the tropes that flatten men like Willis and the ones that keep them dreaming of better, and it pokes at them with an irreverent sense of humor. In one episode, Willis finds himself blocked from the doors of a police station, as if by some invisible supernatural force, because he doesn’t belong there — there’s no room in a cop procedural for some random Asian dude to just show up and start digging around. It’s only when he presents himself as “Delivery Guy” that he’s let in, having figured out how to weaponize a tiresome cliché for his own purposes.

But all this self-referentiality only does so much to disguise the fact that the central plot is rather thin — and, worse, populated by characters only slightly more dimensional than the very archetypes they’re meant to challenge. In Yu’s book, a second-person screenplay format helped bridge the gap between the reader and a protagonist who struggles to define himself, sometimes even to himself, outside of the assumptions others seemed to have of him: All those “you”s forced the audience directly into his shoes. The series is unable to achieve a comparable connection. Despite a copious (first-person) voiceover to dial us directly into Willis’ thoughts, he’s someone we’re watching onscreen from the outside — and one who seems characterized more by what he isn’t than who he actually is.

By about the third 40ish-minute episode (of five sent to critics, from a 10-part season), the show’s meta framing feels at cross purposes with its own narrative. Rather than enhance our understanding of this world, it becomes a layer separating us from characters or stories we might otherwise have come to love on their own terms. Yang acquits himself quite well in the lead role. He jumps persuasively between light comedy, earnest heroism and even action stardom, complete with his own badass kung fu scene in the premiere. And Ronny Chieng seems to be having more fun than anyone as Fatty, Willis’ delightfully irresponsible best friend/roommate/coworker. But the specificity of their dynamic goes undercooked in a show that’s generally better equipped to gesture at emotion than fully inhabit it.

Moments of fleeting poignancy, as in a subplot involving the rocky but essentially caring relationship between Willis’ aging parents, Lily (Diana Lin) and Joe (Tzi Ma), are undermined by a script that’s far more interested in chasing down tropes to shatter than it is in exploring the unique topography of its characters’ souls. Heck, Lana’s whole will-they-won’t-they with Willis seems built around the question of whether she’s the kind of girl who could be interested in this kind of guy, not of what might draw either of these two individuals to one another. Despite Bennet’s best attempts to layer complicated feeling beneath her character’s cool exterior, Lana’s most salient quality, as of the season’s halfway point, is the fact that she’s cagey about her backstory.

The flimsy character work might be less frustrating if the meta angle felt particularly sharp. But there’s a reason Interior Chinatown is set in some inconsistently established version of the ’90s. Its understanding of the role that Asians occupy in pop culture seems stuck in a time before mainstream ideas of what an “Asian role” could be were expanded by works like Fresh Off the Boat or Shang-Chi and the Legend of Whatever or Crazy Rich Asians (which also starred Yang, Chieng and Pang) or Everything Everywhere All at Once — or even ones like The Acolyte and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend that aren’t about Asianness per se, but featured Asian characters in non-stereotypical roles.

It’s true that old assumptions die hard, that there’s still room for more varied or more nuanced or just plain more onscreen depictions of Asian Americanness, that even now (maybe especially now) we’re dogged by the fear that whatever progress we’ve made could be undone again. And on a more practical level, I’ll allow that Interior Chinatown might have some new tricks up its sleeve for the back half of the season; a development involving Turner, in particular, left me wondering if the show’s true ambitions might be bigger and weirder than it initially let on.

But it sure blunts the effectiveness of a piece of cultural commentary when it seems like it’s reacting to circumstances from 20 years ago, rather than engaging with the conversation as it stands now. Interior Chinatown purports to be a step forward, that lets the Willises of the world finally have their day in the sun. But so far, it’s gotten only as far as turning him into a different sort of symbol. In the first half of the season, he’s a manifestation of an ancient wound, a face of an ongoing fight, a ray of hope for a brighter tomorrow. It’s got a ways to go before it figures out what makes him a full-fledged human being.