(courtesy IMP Awards)
How powerful are the stories we tell ourselves, individually and as a society?
Pretty damn powerful if Interior Chinatown is to be believed, a streaming show based on Charles Yu’s book of the same name that takes meta (the idea, not the company, thank you) to a whole new level and which asks us to consider how much agency we have in our stories.
It asks, and really intelligently too for the most part (the second half of the 10-episodes run of episodes does falter a little), us to ponder whether we are still unwitting participants in our lives or whether, if we wanted to, we could powerfully influence where they go.
In the fantastically imaginative world of Interior Chinatown, that’s no ideal piece of musing.
The series centres on Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), a waiter at a somewhat downtrodden restaurant in Chinatown owned by his Uncle Wong (Archie Kao) who wonders again and again why his life is so spectacularly humdrum and why seems to be invisible to everyone around him.
He isn’t as invisible as he thinks, and plenty of people notice him from BFF Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng) to childhood friend and now top-flight lawyer, Audrey (Annie Change) to his devoted mum Lily (Diana Lin) who has soaring if stymied dreams of her own, but he constantly compares himself to his longtime missing brother Jonathan (Chris Pang) and finds himself coming up short.
Jonathan, who disappeared years earlier in mysterious circumstances, was handsome, well-loved and endlessly capable, the kind of person that Willis dreams of being and whom he tells himself he has no chance of ever being.
Then one day, looking out the window from the restaurant, Willis sees a young woman begging for help but before he can react, she is bundled into a van and disappears.
That might be that, but Willis can’t ditch the nagging sense that something big has been put in train, and after he’s contacted by a police detective Lana lee (Chloe Bennett), he is drawn into mystery upon mystery, all of it leading back to his brother who may still be out there somewhere if only Willis and Lana can connect all the clues.
But this is where Interior Chinatown defies all expectations of what it will be and how it will tell its story.
For this very clever parody of serialised police procedurals and arch critic of the way in which Asians, in particular, Chinese Americans are represented in popular culture, refuses to be too conventional, an approach which is both its greatest strength and its Achilles heel.
Let’s start with the positive side of the ledger first.
As storytelling goes, Interior Chinatown is wildly, wonderfully clever, a show that dares to try and balance the world as we know it and the one lurking just below the surface, all the time asking which one is real and whether we are the architects of our success or demise or merely puppets of some greater regime beyond our perception entirely.
While it tells a straight enough in certain respects, it is challenging that narrative certainty with twists and turns that rely on the idea that, Truman Show-like, that we are also merely players in a certain heavily scripted game.
There may not be gods rolling the dice necessarily as ABBA wondered in their Song “The Winner Takes it All”, but it becomes clear that neither Willis nor any of the people around him have as much agency in their lives as they might think.
Quite what is at play is best left to the watching of the show, and the way it develops is both inventivel enthralling and frustratingly obtuse, but at the very least, Interior Chinatown represents some very imaginative storytelling at work, the kind that makes watching TV worth every single second you devote to it.
Alas, while the ideas are big and compellingly deployed in some ways, and you will love the Matrix vibes throughout, they are also muddled and repetitively presented with the show not exactly sticking the landing at the end.
Without giving too much away, the final scenes are supposed to have built up to a huge momet where Willis seizes back his agency from those who have always held it in his ways, but while the finale is supposed to be inspiringly BIG, it falls flat more than it should because the series, brilliant though it is, hasn’t really earnt the ending.
It’s also a little confusing, and while mystery is stock in trade for Interior Chinatown, it is a little too “keep you hanging” at the end, especially after so much ideas were thrown at the wall throughout the series.
No doubt there will be a second series, but until then, you are left with more questions than answers at the end, and while enigmas and mysteries and riddles are fun (or at least intensely engaging, right Winston Churchill?), their attractiveness dims considerably if enough answers aren’t given as fulsomely as possible.
Still, for all that, Interior Chinatown is a great and hugely entertaining watch, and thanks to Ronny Chieng, who is the MVP of the series, very, very funny in certain ways, with that buoyant comedy, also served by the two parodic cops at the centre of the TV show at the heart of the series, Black and White: Impossible Crimes Unit (a delicious parody of Law and Order), Green and Turner (Lisa Gilroy and Sullivan Turner respectively), doing a good job of ameliorating the shows’ darker, more existential moments of which there are many.
It is, all in all, well worth your precious streaming time, and while it may not always stick all the audacious landings it is attemotings, it;s exhilarating watching Interior Chinatown go for broke and tells a story that huge and mysterious and film noir-ish and hilarious and which ultimately asks the most potent question of all – who are we really and what role do we play in bringing that person intobeing?
Interior Chinatown streams on Disney+
Interview with the creators