Two years ago, it was announced that Charles Yu would adapt his own award-winning novel, Interior Chinatown, into a TV series starring Jimmy O. Yang, Ronny Chieng, and Chloe Bennet, and co-produced by Taika Waititi, who is also directing the pilot. Well, that series is now here, set to debut on November 19 on Hulu. When it was first announced, I wondered how Yu would translate his novel, which is already written in script format, for the screen. Based on the trailer, I can honestly say that this is not what I expected, and it looks AMAZING.
The main thing I’m NOT getting from the trailer is that in the book, Willis Wu, played by Jimmy O. Yang, is an actor stuck playing a background role on a police procedural. In the trailer, it appears that Willis is just living his life, and he gets tangled up in a police investigation occurring within the Chinatown neighborhood where he lives and works. The TV element of the story SEEMS to be gone, but I emphasize “seems” because, well, Willis Wu’s world looks an awful lot like a police procedural from the 2000s.
It's something about the combo of bright colors and lighting. Series in the 2000s were so overlit, I have memories of certain shows just being like, orange, or green, or some sickly shade of blue. The warm earth tones of the 90s disappeared into cold, bright colors highlighted by sharp pools of light. This trailer for Interior Chinatown is bringing me back to those 2000s procedurals. Besides certain scenes very clearly being shot on the too-uniform streets of a backlot, the colors are so bright and blown out, just like CSI and its many imitators.
But there are some surreal moments in the trailer that could be the TV element within the story, or it could be that was traded for giving Willis an active imagination. Maybe Charles Yu opted to ditch the screenplay format for the series, since it is being performed and not read—the script formatting of the novel serves a specific narrative function that would not translate to TV, since you’re no longer reading the story but watching it—or maybe they’re just not giving that part away yet.
Or maybe Yu is using the style and feel of a 2000s procedural to highlight the same themes the script format serves in the novel. Rather than try to recreate the novel’s hook, perhaps he found a different, thematically similar one for the show. I can’t wait to find out!
