‘Interior Chinatown’ is a sharp, satirical look at stereotypes, identity, and the struggle for leading roles in Hollywood

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Interior Chinatown, a new show now streaming on Disney+ that plays around with small-screen stereotypes and television tropes, begins with two men taking out the trash in an alley behind a Chinatown restaurant.

“You know how in cop shows, there’s usually a cold open?” says one of them, explaining a scene before the title sequence that jumps straight into the mystery of the week. “The person in a first scene of a procedural is either a victim or a witness.”

But Willis Wu, the Chinese-American character speaking, is neither a victim nor a witness; there’s no body in the dumpster, and he survives the cold open.

Willis is, in fact, the protagonist of a Hulu comedy-drama – he just doesn’t know it. Played by Jimmy O. Yang of Silicon Valley, Willis views himself as Generic Asian Guy No. 1 in somebody else’s network show – and does not expect people like him to have a starring role unless they are Kung Fu Guy, like his revered older brother, who disappeared suddenly years ago.

Adapted by former Westworld screenwriter Charles Yu from his 2020 novel of the same name, Interior Chinatown is, on one level, about how Chinese and other Asian-Americans have been pigeonholed on TV until not too long ago, an allegory for the struggle of racialized actors in North America to land lead roles.

Viewers of many backgrounds, however, will relate to Willis’s sense of being a background character in someone else’s series. The show can be like a Charlie Kaufman comedy steeped in critical race theory; or The Matrix – if it replaced bullet-time action sequences with meditations on alienation in diasporic communities, that feeling of here but not here.

Interior Chinatown’s cast has faced Hollywood struggles uncannily like its characters

Interior Chinatown also works as a mystery, as Willis tries to figure out how and why his brother got written out of a show-within-the-show called Black and White.

The restaurant where Willis works is often a backdrop for scenes in Black and White, a police procedural about a white female cop named Green (Lisa Gilroy) and a Black male cop named Turner (Sullivan Jones). When they arrive at the restaurant, the lighting brightens to what, in the novel, is called “hero lighting, designed to hit their faces just right.”

Black and White, which has a “dun-dun” leitmotif similar to Law & Order but is simply part of the reality of Interior Chinatown, has recently added a supporting character named Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennett). She’s getting more and more screen time thanks to a multiepisode arc about a gang war in Chinatown.

But while Lana is supposed to be the “Chinatown expert,” she doesn’t really know anything about Chinatown, or her own background. Willis’s fellow waitstaff, watching her at a police press conference, debate whether she is Thai or Korean.

And so Lana teams up with Willis – who is an actual Chinatown expert, having never really left it – to get to the bottom of the gang war that may have something to do with his brother’s disappearance.

To move beyond his life’s usual boundaries, Willis has to try on new stereotypical Asian roles, such as Delivery Guy or Tech Guy. If he’s not in the right costume, he is unable to enter certain buildings – like a video-game character hitting an out-of-bounds area.

Plenty of television is self-referential, from the increasingly ouroboros-like realms of reality TV, to the grimace-to-the-camera mockumentary style that prevails on so many sitcoms.

But what makes Interior Chinatown ambitious and original is how it tries to find a space for poignant drama and real emotional stakes in between its sharp satire and comic moments (the best are with Ronny Chieng as a cranky busboy).

The show is only intermittently successful on that front. It’s hard to feel anything but once-removed from the budding romance between Willis and Lana, for instance, when he asks what her backstory is – and she doesn’t seem to know. (The writers on Black and White haven’t supplied her with one yet; or perhaps the writers on Interior Chinatown haven’t – I don’t know how much more meta things will get as critics were only given the first five of 10 episodes.)

It’s easier to feel for Willis in his attempts to connect with his aging father (Tzi Ma) and navigate shared grief with his mother (Diana Lin). But even the parents’ plotlines can feel tangential, padding out what might work better in 30-minute instalments into hour-long episodes. It’s one thing to make fun of black-and-white stereotypes – it’s another to transcend them.