‘Interior Chinatown’ Finds the Farcical in Cop-Show Tropes

On a cop show, no one is supposed to be more compelling than the cops themselves. One rung below them is the crime victim, whose backstory has to be interesting enough for us to care that our heroes are trying to bring them justice, even posthumously. Still lower on the ladder are all the bit players, whose contributions to the cops’ investigation might seem insignificant, but collectively fill out the picture: the retail clerk who digs out a receipt that helps to establish a timeline; the barmaid who remembers the victim was harassed by a regular; the neighbor who heard upsetting sounds through the wall. 

Comfortable though we may be with the rhythms of a detective procedural — which, after all, conform to an endlessly repeatable format — Interior Chinatown has questions. Which crime victims’ stories are selected to be told, and why? Who should tell them? And what happens when one of these bit players has more to say than can be contained in their one allotted scene?

Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) is a waiter at Golden Palace, his uncle’s restaurant in the Chinatown neighborhood of a city called Port Harbour. He is plagued by feelings of dissatisfaction he can’t quite define, telling his friend and co-worker Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng), “I feel like I’m a background character in someone else’s story.” And from some angles, that’s exactly what he is. After he witnesses a young woman’s abduction, the shot pulls back to show us, via a late-‘90s-vintage TV, that Willis is in an episode of Black & White: Impossible Crimes Unit. Detectives Miles Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Sarah Green (Lisa Gilroy) are perfectly mismatched — he’s book-smart, she’s street-smart — but they’re assigned to work with a third detective, Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet), “in light of certain cultural considerations.” (Willis’ Golden Palace colleagues argue over whether she’s probably Korean or Thai.)

Lana also knows that Willis has his own crime story: Years ago, his charming, charismatic, kung fu master brother (Chris Pang) disappeared, and his parents (Diana Lin and Tzi Ma) still haven’t recovered. Lana wants to find out what Willis’ brother might have had to do with a pattern of incidents in Chinatown that no one else has connected to each other, and she wants Willis to help. Charles Yu adapted the series — which premieres on Hulu November 19th — from his 2020 novel of the same name; Taika Waititi is among its executive producers, and directed the series premiere.

The rules and structure of cop shows are so rigid that comedies have been spoofing them for decades: Police Squad! aired its one and only season all the way back in 1982; since then, Angie Tribeca, NTSF: SD: SUV::, Medical Police and Murderville have followed, not to mention one-off episodes like Community’s “Basic Lupine Urology” and Sesame Street’s “The Missing M.” If I tell you that the November 25th episode of What We Do in the Shadows is called “P.I. Undercover: New York,” you can probably predict with some accuracy what you’re going to see. Coming so late to the idea of goofing on police procedurals means some of what we see in the show has been covered elsewhere, from Green and Turner’s vibe — horny but officially chaste — to her penchant for punny on-theme gallows humor about their cases. (When a violinist is found dead after beefing with his conductor: “Looks like their relationship was… inharmonious.”) Willis and Fatty have a discussion while moving boxes outside the restaurant — a classic setup for Law & Order witnesses getting interviewed by detectives — only to stop when they realize Fatty has taken the ones Willis just unloaded from the truck and loaded them back on.

The rules around Willis are also variations on themes we’ve seen before. A character realizing that the arbitrary limitations on them are determined by the scripted narrative they live in: It’s a construct that’s less common in TV than it is in films like Stranger Than Fiction or Pleasantville. On television, WandaVision is probably the most recent show where characters feel they’re not able to move through the world due to forces they can’t entirely understand. Working with Lana, Willis is confronted by the indignities of being an extra in Green and Turner’s star vehicle. When they’re interviewing witnesses about the woman whose abduction Willis saw, he can’t leave the restaurant. They can’t see him when he’s standing right next to Lana. He can’t get into the police precinct because, according to a janitor incomprehensibly working on the sidewalk outside, he doesn’t belong there. 

The last of these propels Willis into taking more risks and finding workarounds for the rules of the Black & White world. Not only does he use the tools available to him to contrive a reason to get into the police station bullpen; he also creates community with the other “extras” at the precinct — a desk sergeant whose name no one knows, an evidence room clerk, the aforementioned janitor. None of them are from Chinatown, but we can imagine the different ghettos the Black & White narrative has consigned them to — and the four of them work together to solve problems. (We’re given to understand that Lana used to be in their position too: Turner and Green keep calling her “the Chinatown expert,” with varying degrees of contempt, but this is her “first time as a cop,” having formerly worked as an assistant krav maga instructor and a barback; a drawer in her desk at the precinct is filled with dozens of her old work ID badges.) 

But even as Willis gains more autonomy and becomes more important to Lana’s investigation, we see how climbing up the ladder of cop show importance widens the space between himself and his old life. Fatty supports Willis in the abstract, but he also personally has no big dreams beyond being Willis’ sidekick forever, so he suffers from Willis’ long absences.

The show’s biggest problem is probably the casting of Yang in the lead role. Though Yang, an accomplished stand-up comedian, has been very funny in comic relief performances like Silicon Valley’s Jian-Yang, his acting chops aren’t quite up to carrying a series. Even as a character whose main mode is bafflement, Yang is outclassed by Bennet, Lin and living legend Ma. Chieng is another comic who isn’t particularly known for his acting range, but midway through the season, he gets an arc in which Fatty brings a little Ed Debevic’s energy to the Golden Palace, and Chieng makes the absolute most of it. 

I also wish the show had done more of the genre crossovers we see in the series premiere, where Willis’ realistic and grounded life gives way not just to the visual style of Black & White, but also to a kung-fu action show when a gang fight breaks out at the restaurant, and to a hard seltzer commercial that surrounds Willis and Lana at a nightclub she brings him to. But even when it’s treading ground you, as a viewer, have already trod, or when its ambitions aren’t quite ambitious enough, Interior Chinatown has a lot to say, and from voices we don’t hear enough.